4 posts tagged “computer”
It's hard to believe that, ten years ago, we were making preparations for the Y2K cut-over. As an IT professional, this was something we had to plan for, prepare for, and test.
We spent lots of money on remediation. I know that more than a few companies chose to replace the systems outright. At the time, my office specialized in implementing such systems. After Y2K, everyone had a shiny new system--it took a while before things picked up again.
As this article notes, the use of off-shore people started with Y2K. Once companies realized the benefit, they realized they could continue to send work overseas.
At the end of the day, was disaster averted, or was it a waste? Overall, I think that the remediation effort served its key aim of preventing lots of annoying little problems from causing not a global collapse, but months and years of lost productivity after the fact, sorting it out piecemeal.
Y2K came at an odd time in the world of computing. It was at the heels of the first internet wave, when such technology became a key part of day-to-day life. Over the course of the nineties, what was something that tended to be part of big business was being pushed to smaller and smaller organizations. Y2K, I think, was the capstone event for this shift, leading to a few years until the next phase.
One of the "clients" of my office happens to be our internal e-mail system. Today, in a fit of frustration, I went to the account manager for that group with a 1 GB USB flash drive.
"Can we plug this into the mail server, and increase my mail quota?"
Set the WABAC machine to 1992. Micro Center hand just opened, and the lost leader of the day was a box of 10 3.5", 1.44 MB floppy disks for $1. that was a crazy low price.* I took one, walked up to one of the SysAdmins at Miami, and asked, "Can we stick this in the VAX and increase my quota?"
Oddly, the increase (a quadrupling) was about the same in both cases.
*Putting this in today's terms: a 2GB flash drive runs $7 at Microcenter, or $0.003/MB (3/10 of a cent). My box of disks would run a bit over two cents.
And I'm even Microsoft certified.
I've had posts about alternate keyboard layouts before. The Dvorak layout is one that most people have probably heard of--that QWERTY was made not for typing efficiency, but rather to slow typists down to compensate for limitations of early mechanical typewriters. However, this article below investigates this notion.
As it turns out, back when there was no single keyboard layout standard, QWERTY was not significantly better or worse than any other layouts. Further, when Dvorak became available, the studies were, at best flawed, and bordered out having an outright bias.
QWERTY is often suggested as an example of the first mover advantage, that something that gets an early foothold will become standard, even in light of the availability of superior options. However, I think the truth is more complicated that that.
