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Comment by KronisLV | Hacker News Reader

So how did this work before the Internet was commonplace?

> Some of those could be batched offline and verified when the connection is back up, but others can't.

That feels like someone decided that implementing a resilient business continuity plan wasn't worth it (which it may as well be, the impact is great but the likelihood low), e.g. manually making phone calls to verify the needed information, having backup paper copies of documents and so on.

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Pre–internet, depending on the size of the store and retail chain, your cash registers might tie to a local small system which in turn talked to a central mainframe (IBM, Dec, Unisys, etc) using APPC over SNA, or TCP/IP, or Decnet, or whatever Unisys used. Leased lines were not particularly fast, but did not need to be, you’re talking less than a megabyte of data at most per day.

Before internet was commonplace you would have to go to a doctor and get a paper prescription which was sometimes done on a paper with watermarks and verification was that this piece of paper has a stamp or a seal on it and doctor's signature.

There were more forgeries with paper prescription than there is with online system.

Are there provinces with electronic prescriptions? I always get a piece of paper (in Alberta).

I've had cases where the pharmacy (indeed London Drugs) phoned the doctor to ask them to fax a renewal.

In Ontario my doctor sends prescriptions "electronically". In practice it's not clear whether this is like an email, or whether someone behind the scenes prints out the prescription and faxes it. Apparently the local clinic has a team that is solely responsible for faxing things on behalf of the doctors.

Here in europe it is a government database where all the clinics and pharmacies are connected to, so doctor essentially creates a record in the database.

When you visit pharmacy they ask for id and enter your id number system shows them all your active prescriptions and past ones as well, which sometimes helps when your prescription is not renewed for some reason they can give you a week supply while you sort it out.

That depends on the country. In France it varies by doctor, some will use Doctolib (a great third party private company that does appointment scheduling, video consultations and digital prescriptions) which allows you to have a digital prescription that you click on a button in the app/website to share with a specific pharmacy, and when you get there they just get your social security card and... then print out your prescription, and scan and print on it how and when was it fulfilled. Others just give you an old fashioned hand written note, or print an A4 sheet of paper.

Alberta is pretty close to being electronic.

That makes sense given the shift to electronic records that has happened in the last few years, but obviously not a factorwith this incident.

You can still ask and get those AFAIK.

>That feels like someone decided that implementing a resilient business continuity plan wasn't worth it (which it may as well be, the impact is great but the likelihood low), e.g. manually making phone calls to verify the needed information, having backup paper copies of documents and so on.

When you wake up one morning and you're under a cyber attack and no longer have network access, how easy do you think it is to just start manually phoning in prescription information?

This may come as a shock to you, but the internet has greatly increased the efficiency of business over passing paper around and making phone calls. You can't just flick a switch and go back to the old system.

exactly, some transactions can be streamlined with digitization but most rely on humans giving a fuck.

Often local servers with daily batch uploading (at the time over phone lines) to larger corporate servers (often time shares)

Lost of labor hours are the real answer.

Basically what would happen was that someone would write it down on a paper form, mail that form off to the typing pool at the corporate headquarter where some clerk would then type it into the central system with a delay of 5-10 days from point of sale to recording into the inventory management system being totally normal, leading to a lot of overstocking and waste.

So to run offline would mean getting a hold of a lot of people that aren't there anymore in addition to reintroducing all of the risk(and fraud opportunities) that running without real time access to centralized data.

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