| Summary: | This is a commentary on Professor Giere’s essay ‘Verpasste Chancen. Nachdenken über Fehlentwicklungen der Medizinischen Informatik [Missed opportunities. Reflections on misdevelopments in medical informatics]’. The author addresses some of the issues discussed in the ‘missed opportunities’ and comments on them in six commentaries. In addition, he seeks to describe the period of the 1970s, a time when medical informatics was established as a new field, with Wolfgang Giere as one of its pioneers. After reading the ‘missed opportunities’, one may ask: Were there mainly misdevelopments during the time described, were there only ‘missed opportunities’? This impression would by no means be correct from the author’s point of view. It would have been desirable that further progress could have been made in the projects described by Wolfgang Giere – if this was realistically possible given the state of knowledge and the organizational and technical possibilities at that time. Though there was also important, successful work and considerable progress during that period.
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