Streaming Data

Preface

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with speed as it relates to computing and am always trying to find a way to do something faster. In the late 1990s, when I spent most of my time writing software in C++, my favorite keyword was __asm, which means “the following block of code is in assembly language,” and I understood what was happening at the machine level. I worked on mobile software in the early 2000s and again the story was how could we sync data faster or make things run faster on the PalmPilots and Windows CE devices we were using? At the time we had huge (by that day’s standards, anyway) medical databases (around 25–50 MB in size) that required external cards on a PalmPilot to store and several applications ...