Debugging Lotus 1-2-3 by fax
blog.jgc.org
blog.jgc.org
Why thousands? They’d attempted to figure out the address for a bunch of small websites and their search had concluded that they were all run by the FSF.
They were not. They were all Joomla websites with the GPL linked in the footer. I always thought that would be my strangest tale but no..
Someone once sent me a 10-12 page fax with printed pages of gnu.org with handwritten translations on it. A few days later they faxed me asking if I had received the pages and wanting to know when they were going to be on the website.
I tracked down their email address, and put them in touch with the translator for their language. Again via email.
Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be easier.
Does anyone else remember the email to fax relay of tpc.int? Used that more than once in the mid-90s at my first job which had a heavy fax culture as most of our clients were not yet using the internet. One of my first jobs was getting the office onto a single Internet connection (and provider) and then getting a reseller account for our ISP setup so we could offer dial up and IMAP email to our customers.
Not that specific one, but I remember using others. Naturally, I can remember the names of none of them.
The one I thought was the most magical was the one that allowed me to send a fax from my fairly ordinary non-smart Nokia GSM phone. In the days when I was a road warrior ("digital nomad" in Millennial), this was a godsend since fax machines were more common than e-mail.
Screenshots, printed out, and then faxed, with a question or remark hand-written on the page, I'd have to go check my office mailbox for issues submitted by 2-3 users. And this was only 10-15 years ago.
You know could paste the screenshot into an email...nevermind. We took orders via fax at that time so I guess it made sense?
For a lot of reasons, the development of the remote control application (written in Visual Basic 4.2 IIRC) was a painful death march that had began a too few short weeks before WC98 went live, weeks during which I've worked 100 hours a week and more, sleeping under my desk on which were the development Octane and PCs; I suppose many can relate.
As the remote control application was so late, it evolved almost daily during the World Cup; we basically debugged it at night, compiled and tested it during the day, pushed the binaries to our central server (an Origin 2000) through ISDN, binaries that the on-site team had to download and install before each and every match, after calling me to know the eventual problems to sort out.
The main point was that all features weren't ready from the beginning; during the first few weeks, the daily release of the software could only manage the things that were supposed to be happening in the field.
So one night I was (finally) home and I suddenly saw a match starting live on TV, in Lyon. And I realised Carlos (the local team manager in Lyon) hadn't called me about the daily software update. So I called Carlos while the match was beginning : "No worries", he said. "Yesterday's software worked fine, and I know you're tired so I managed it myself". "OK, but did you install today's update?" "What for? Yesterday's release was fine". "It was all fine yesterday", I replied, "but tonight is the first match which can have extra time and penalties. Yesterday's release doesn't manage penalties so I really hope we won't need it". Yeah, you know how this ends already...
Because you know, downloading the software through ISDN and installing it wasn't really an option once the match had begun...
What do you think happened? I watched the game going on and score stuck 0 to 0... And going to extra time... Still 0 - 0 at the end of extra time... Penalties! Time for improvising, live in front of about 2 billions spectators, isn't that nice? From that moment and until the end, I was on the phone with Carlos. First, to allow for a proper display, we had to reset the score to track the penalties like actual goals.
Then at last came the tough moment, displaying the final score, by filling in all data manually. I could only see the result live, on my home TV, hoping for the best... "OK, as the remote control software won't work, you'll have to manipulate the Octane directly" (which of course was never envisioned, and he had absolutely zero experience of). "Hit exactly all the keys as I tell you : on the numpad, hit 5000, then enter. Hit tab twice, press 3. Hit tab once, press 4. Hit tab twice, press 4. Hit tab once, press 3. Hit tab 3 times, press 0. Hit tab once, press 0. Press Ctrl + *. Press Ctrl + Enter. Call the OB truck and tell them to send in the picture".
It went all right in the end, but boy it was tiring.
"No, not the slash under the question mark key, the other one."
5 Minutes Later...
"No, not the slash under the question mark key, the other one."
(Also, not all fax debug stories are done in 45 seconds. I gotta see if I can find my old faxes - fixing a "stop shipping" bug in a video game via a series of back-and-forth faxes from a cruise ship. :)