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I’m 50, so lived through it. But still wonder how companies operated, how did anything get done? Without computers and automation. Similar how did people learn

I’m 50, so lived through it. But still wonder how companies operated, how did anything get done? Without computers and automation. Similar how did people learn things or know what is happing in world before the internet? I’m seconds away from any known fact.

KineticLensman 6y ago
> But still wonder how companies operated, how did anything get done? At the small (13 people) software house I joined in 1993, our information management was physical filing cabinets. Key project plans were printed and stored. A visit from the ISO auditor always involved diving into the filing cabinets. Source code wasn't printed (phew!) but the project records would explain where on the servers the software could be found. Repo-based software configuration management as we would recognise it today was virtually non-existent. Projects tracked releases to customers using configuration notes that (in theory) allowed you to identify the resources required and how to recreate / build the delivered system. We had nothing like CI/CD - releases were few and intermittent. We were disciplined and the directors were quality focussed, so the system actually worked reasonably well. The company had evolved some very good checklists for projects that were used at start-up to build the information framework for a project of a given type and size (we had three or four different generic types of project). When I left ten years later the basic processes were still broadly identical, although there was less emphasis on the physical filing. [Edit] > Similar how did people learn things For software, from product manuals and usenet. For domain issues, from experts and sometimes books. E.g. when we built in ~1995 a system to support analysis of satellite constellations, the team concerned actually bought and read books on orbital mechanics and spherical geometry. I was a space nerd and still remembering being pleased at explaining to the programmers that the modelled satellites were changing speed as they orbited because the programmers had correctly implemented Kepler's laws.
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bombcar 6y ago
Lots and lots of manual processes, and lots and lots of "man"power (in quotes because often it was literally acres and acres of women doing computations by hand - a "computer" was a person, often a woman, doing computations).
agumonkey 6y ago
Armies of people and layers of management. One thing though, there was a natural bottleneck that was in tune with human needs. Today computerized sides of the system (say automatic complaint system on internet) are throwing too much requests that end up in now crippled human services operating half on legacy paper paradigms and half with bad software. ps: chances are some big fund blockchain project will evaporate all of this in a few moments. It's the kind of thing large enough and capable enough to wipe legacy.

KineticLensman 6y ago

> But still wonder how companies operated, how did anything get done? At the small (13 people) software house I joined in 1993, our information management was physical filing cabinets. Key project plans were printed and stored. A visit from the ISO auditor always involved diving into the filing cabinets. Source code wasn't printed (phew!) but the project records would explain where on the servers the software could be found. Repo-based software configuration management as we would recognise it today was virtually non-existent. Projects tracked releases to customers using configuration notes that (in theory) allowed you to identify the resources required and how to recreate / build the delivered system. We had nothing like CI/CD - releases were few and intermittent. We were disciplined and the directors were quality focussed, so the system actually worked reasonably well. The company had evolved some very good checklists for projects that were used at start-up to build the information framework for a project of a given type and size (we had three or four different generic types of project). When I left ten years later the basic processes were still broadly identical, although there was less emphasis on the physical filing. [Edit] > Similar how did people learn things For software, from product manuals and usenet. For domain issues, from experts and sometimes books. E.g. when we built in ~1995 a system to support analysis of satellite constellations, the team concerned actually bought and read books on orbital mechanics and spherical geometry. I was a space nerd and still remembering being pleased at explaining to the programmers that the modelled satellites were changing speed as they orbited because the programmers had correctly implemented Kepler's laws.

deleted 6y ago
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bombcar 6y ago

Lots and lots of manual processes, and lots and lots of "man"power (in quotes because often it was literally acres and acres of women doing computations by hand - a "computer" was a person, often a woman, doing computations).

agumonkey 6y ago

Armies of people and layers of management. One thing though, there was a natural bottleneck that was in tune with human needs. Today computerized sides of the system (say automatic complaint system on internet) are throwing too much requests that end up in now crippled human services operating half on legacy paper paradigms and half with bad software. ps: chances are some big fund blockchain project will evaporate all of this in a few moments. It's the kind of thing large enough and capable enough to wipe legacy.