He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.
They're hard not to love.
The I fall asleep at my desk, periodically waking up shouting "STOP-A!" and hallucinating about being bitten by thick ethernet vampires.
Going to make myself a coffin...
When the Sun 4/330 I used to have needed a RAM upgrade someone flew up from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it. Fortunately we were in the Grassmarket about 10 minutes from the Castle so he had plenty of things for him to do to keep him amused until his return flight.
Edit: I checked and the max the 4/330 could take was 96MB so I suspect the upgrade was an awesome 64MB. That machine cost more than most cars I have owned - even without allowing for inflation.
Nothing’s changed on that front.
I would sit there and wait for RAM hungry customers that would call me on my 3 lb cellphone lol. Each one has to buy at least a $0.39 taco so I wouldn’t get kicked out by the manager. They had armed security, who I tipped 20 dollars a day. I hung fliers all over town with tear-off tabs.
Then I went to COMDEX, it changed my life. Within 2 years I was in my early 20s and moving 2-3 million in hardware a year. It was a heady time.
Then, the business dried up overnight with online sales.
Fortunately I saw that coming and had moved into technical services and contracting, and sold the parts wholesale business to one of my competitors lol. The local wholesale distribution biz was dead within 8 months.
As prices fell rapidly at the supply level, local box stores would occasionally sell off stock at deep discounts (reflecting the real market price). Being a teenage sociopath, I would buy every last bit of it in town and then coast on the uninformed price perception for a week or two.
Prices were falling so fast at that time that the stores were always wrong footed, so I was able to keep up that racket long enough to get to the bottom of that mechanism and start ordering in bulk directly from city of industry California.
Place was called Ma labs, iirc. After that it was obvious to start moving disk drives, video cards, processors, and later everything else too. I was just exploiting basic market inefficiencies , since the only other sources were the big box stores that were constantly 2-4 months behind the price curve.
Then COMDEX happened. It got me tied directly in to motherboard and peripheral card manufacturers. I also got introduced to the cocaine and extremely friendly booth-girl shmoozefest, and NGL for naive Alaskan me it was heady stuff. The real deals and the points negotiations were made in the afterparties with piles of coke and very persuasive “account representatives”. Memorable times were had in the hedonistic environment of an exploding industry.
At that time there were a lot of small manufacturers in industrial parks. They were usually pretty small outfits usually just a shop with a few hot air stations for warranty work and a wave soldering table, 15-20 employees at jet labs, for example, which was one of our big suppliers of motherboards, video cards, modems, lan, and other peripheral cards.
My activity festered a plague of tiny pc builders selling systems, and launched the careers of at least 50 technicians and small businesses. We used to put on big public LAN parties and public PC repair clinics as promotions for our “dealers”. I worked with a training/testing outfit to get new dealers A+ certification to reduce the damage to society and actually grew into a semi responsible citizen during that time.
Fond memories but I’m glad to leave that hustle behind.
After that, I unwittingly became a software developer for a major criminal organisation. I thought they were a car dealership, but gradually it became apparent as I built out their backend that the dealership was just a small part of a very large laundromat.
It took me years to extricate myself from that and for years afterwards they would give me gentle reminders that they were keeping an eye on me. Free 500 dollar an hour lawyer’s though. They never let me get near a courtroom or a police interaction without “proper” representation showing up even for years afterwards (statute of limitations?)
The fact that they always knew when I brushed up against the legal system in any small way, even traffic tickets in rental cars, gave me great respect for the scope of their concern. That and their obvious love for mid range turbine helicopters.
I was probably lucky to leave that alive.
Owner lamented finding 4MB sticks of RAM that had fallen behind the workstations that had cost hundreds of dollars back in the day, as he was selling (and this was a while ago) laptops with 1-2GB of memory).
You were lucky! In my computer class at school in 1979 we got one compile a week. Punched into cards which were taken to the local insurance company who actually had a computer.
Most of the way through backing up the 4.3 GB HD to the 20 GB HD, I heard a screech and the old hard drive twisted slightly on the desk... conservation of linear momentum. The drive was visible to the BIOS, but refused to spin up after that.
I put the hard drive in a ziplock bag, put it in the freezer to give the parts slightly more clearance from thermal contraction, and slammed the hard drive nice and hard on the desktop to free the stiction. That revived the drive long enough to finish my copy.
I did have backups of all of the really important information, but restoring from a stack of floppies is more tedious, slower, and less fun than percussive maintenance on a hard drive.
Back when I had an internship working on MEMS gyros for GPS guided mortar rounds, we had to sometimes perform similar percussive maintenance if static electricity had caused the moving parts to contact the substrate. We took the gyro, and smacked it hard on the desk in an "eyeballs out" orientation to give it something like 10 to 100 Gs of acceleration in an attempt to un-stick the MEMS gyro.
As much as I love hardware, I much prefer our current solid state wonderland.
Huh?
What I heard is what a cold drive would be a bit more magnetically stable and IMMSMV that surely worked, because I never had a drive with a stuck heads but I did had drives what would just abort the read or return gibberish, but after an hour in the freezer they would read just fine, till they heat up again. That's for the drives mfg after 2000, if that matters.
The way I had always understood it was that if you had a head crash (which was caused by the head physically contacting the platter, overcoming the resistance of the air gap between the head and platter, usually due to physical impact) that the magnetism of the head would prevent it from lifting back up on its own, and that freezing the drive would cause the metal in the platter to contract away from the head, which was restricted in movement by its armature, thereby restoring the air gap and lifting the head away. If you started the drive spinning before it heated, the head would stay out of contact and you could successfully read data (some of it, for awhile).
That said, my understanding may be incorrect.
All systems were working when they shut down, but ~40% of the disks failed to spin up due to worn down motors.
That's a lot of disks.
It never really worked until you gave blood to the computing gods on a sharp edge of a metal case.
I, for one, haven't flayed open a knuckle on a random razor edge or burr on the inside of a case in like 15 years.
Hmm, yes, true.
Due to absurd government requirements, we were not allowed to use any version control software other than PVCS, and PVCS could only be used for storing official releases of the models. So, the last person in the office on Friday needed to make a dated zipfile of the shared project working directory.
So, one day I convinced the project manager to just let me rename our working directory, create a new empty one in its place, and tell our sysadmins that I accidentally deleted the contents of our working directory. It turns out that the client's sysadmins hadn't set up anything to expunge the oldest backup and had dutifully ignored the alarms that the tape was full. So, the latest available backup was from about a week after they last changed tapes!
The senior sysadmin prominently had a sign on his cubicle reading "Programmers are the ditch diggers of the 21st century." Those same sysadmins were supposed to keep the server room door open while I reinstalled Solaris on a Sunfire V1280 via serial connection from my laptop, because there were cables carrying TSSCI (Top Secret - Secret Compartmentalized Information) traffic. However, the V1280 consumed so much power that the server-room was under-cooled, so the sysadmins illegally shut the door to keep their cubicles cooler. They had top-secret clearances. They knew their obligations to keep me away from those TSSCI cables. Those lazy lazy arrogant sysadmins.
Anyway, unless you have recently passed a restore-from-backup drill, you don't really have backups. Even if you pay absurd amounts of money for sysadmins with top-secret clearances and absurd amounts of money to store your backups in a bomb-proof bunker.
Do you know why I am giving you the two hour history?
First, I recognize that I need human interaction, but do not really like people.
Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me.
Now, go away; I had my week's fill of socializing.
/joking - or am I?
I'm at least going to be waiting for questions to be asked.
"Why was it done this way?"
"Circumstance combined with 'path of least resistance'."
Where does all this hope come from? I’m barely 15 years into my career and I’ve nearly given up…
Hope is for the young and inexperienced. Everytime I come to your rescue, you'd best pay attention. I have an expiration date.
I’m not trying to explain why you shouldn’t change it. I’m trying to help you understand what competing forces made it that way in the first place so you can decide if any of that’s still relevant.
But they are REALLY capable of detecting bad ideas.
There are really good or valid ideas that people try to implement in terrible ways.
things like: for our app on windows, we just ship LIBRARY.DLL with it. We should do the same with linux. (ldd shows 50 inter-dependent libraries)
Never mind that it's part of a decade old contract stipulating a quarter century support...
Greenfield is easy. :)
Because sometimes on the outside systems look confusingly written, but it could be a reflection of the scope of confusing business rules to begin with that they had to scope out
Seems better than being a 50 year old trying to wow a 28 year old interviewer with your skills on whatever hot new framework just came out.
Didn’t have to reboot the others, though.
That is still possible in the modern era.
step two: plug a very cheap switch into the network
step three: have someone move their desk around, and plug a spare cable into the switch at both ends
step four: spend a day doing a binary search by unplugging banks of switches to figure out where the heck all these packets are coming from.
They also hate each and every one of you.
I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.
Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) works.
I'm currently in this situation and a colleage never gives straight answers to anything. It's always some little rant about something and when it's done, I still haven't got my answer.
You should want to know _why_ it works that way too if you want to do any meaningful work with it. Context matters. I’ve seen many cases where the way something works seems dumb, only to learn later they had already tried the “smart” way but ran into some obscure problem which the “dumb” way solves.
Generally speaking to that person helps, although sometimes they do turn out to actually be an idiot.
Anyway, I really don't care about the past in this way. A simple "accounting needs this for that" is enough for me. No need to explain that Adam was getting divorced at the time, so he was grumpy, and, and, and...