Today it’s difficult to imagine anyone thinking that the sun moves around the earth.Similarly, it’s difficult to imagine a programmer thinking that all data could be viewed as a sequential stream of cards. In both cases, once the old theory has been discarded, it seems incredible that anyone ever believed it at all. More fantastically, people who believed the old theory thought the new theory was just as ridiculous then as you think the old theory is now. The earth-centered view of the universe hobbled astronomers who clung to it after a better theory was available. Similarly, the computer-centered view of the computing universe hobbled computer scientists who held on to it after the database-centered theory was available.