As a parent, the day you realize your kids have grown so
much they are about to have kids of their own, is a striking, “Sunrise, Sunset”
realization of the passage of time. Less
emotionally wrenching, one can suddenly realize how thoroughly technology has
changed. Working in or near corporate
IT, working with core business systems that may be decades old, it is easy to
forget how much better things are now than in “the old days.”
Although, there are older “old days” when I had to thread 9
inch tape drives by hand and soldered RS-232 connectors, for me, an arbitrary
choice of “old days” could be the mid-90s when a partial and arbitrary list of
comparisons would include…
·
Dot matrix printers with tractor feed paper were
usually directly connected to one’s pc.
We take the networked, laser printer for granted, the lovely printer
that can print in black and white or in color and offers you a selection of
paper sizes. Not only that, but it will
scan documents and email or fax them, it will often tell you where it is jammed
and it will put itself to sleep when unused.
·
Voice mail was, then, what email is now. I would often find my inbox piled with
numerous voice mails. I would leave
numerous (and, regrettably, lengthy) voicemails. Email was deployed here and there and had
penetrated little in the corporate world.
Now, of course it is one’s email inbox that is stuffed and email is
accessible everywhere. And I find I
almost never leave or check voice mails.
·
Backups!
Stacks of disks, several sets, that you were to rotate through, making
your own backups and not nearly often enough.
Now we work from shared network folders that are automatically archived
by the corporate IT infrastructure folks.
·
Windows.
In the mid-90’s Windows (3.1?) was in the market but it offered little
advantage. Macs were only in the
business world as graphics machines. Instead,
you would have to write a startup script to display the programs available on
the pc.
·
Color.
Getting anything but a monochrome monitor was a big deal. I mean, what was the business value of color?
·
The list could go on and on: the
interoperability of office software, storage beyond 32 megabytes, memory (we
all called it RAM) beyond 640K, browser based software, the internet,
everything Excel can do (Lotus 1-2-3 was the earlier killer app)…
·
What’s your favorite innovation?
Part of the point is to recognize that things do change,
even in seemingly hidebound corporations and sometimes it’s amazing how many
productivity gains there have been. (As
a throwaway, the subject of a future blog post: I think knowledge is the real
limiting factor in productivity nowadays.)
But with all the advances, still…
·
File layouts and old systems. This is why I doubt a super-AI will ever
spring to consciousness and seize the world’s computers. Old, seemingly unchangeable, systems still
churn underneath corporate “agility” and government bureaucracy, systems where
one jot or tittle out of place in an 80 byte record (punch cards, remember?)
will choke a process to full stop.
