Outsourcing the middleware layer

By Sean McGrath

Apparently (I am too young to remember) photocopier machines were greeted with suspicion in some quarters when they were first introduced. How can you know that the machine has made a perfect copy of your vital document? I'm told by someone who remembers those days that he used to proof read the copies coming off the photocopier to check for accuracy.

This sounds silly now, which isn't to say that mechanical copying no longer needs to be done with care [1]. Rather, we are now comfortable with the idea that all we need is a quick visual inspection of the photocopied page to see if it is all there. Once we have that, we do not need to inspect the individual letters to know we have a good copy. We trust the photocopier.

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