A large computer and software manufacturer has discovered an
employee in a dusty, long-forgotten room of its headquarters
building, writes Eric Doyle.
The unnamed man was appointed to a temporary posting in the days
when the company promised its staff a job for life. Once installed
at his desk the man apparently fell asleep and has remained so for
the past 35 years.
Still wearing his official uniform of blue suit and tie and
clutching a copy of the first issue of Computer Weekly, he was
given a briefing on the current state of the industry and given a
tour of the hardware showroom.
In an exclusive interview, the man confessed amazement at the
advances made but claimed he still felt strangely at home in the
21st century.
"These microchips are a vast improvement on those new-fangled
transistor mainframes we were selling - they are so fast. I spent
some time trying to see how they had miniaturised the water-cooling
system. Compressing so much power into such a small space must have
freed up a lot of buildings for other purposes," he said.
"What's all this about 64 bits? I remember that when Cern booted
out our 'frame they replaced it with a Control Data 60-bit job - 35
years to add four bits and they call that progress? Mind you, our
guys only had 32-bit processors back then.
"I was always a software man, so the briefing from the so-called
e-business team left me puzzled. They talk as if they invented
everything - stole it, more like. I remember hearing Ted Nelson in
1965 talking about non-linear text. He even called it hypertext
back then.
"I know the Arpa military guys had been hatching up a nationwide
computer network. Ever since the Ruskies put that Sputnik up in
1959 they had the heebie-jeebies about secure communications. I
remember hearing about plans to try out a network called Arpanet -
but why everyone now wants to use a military network for business
beats me.
"Networks were for the birds. In my day, we just punched out a
batch of cards, took them to the high priests in the mainframe
glasshouse and a few days later you got your results. If you had
punched the right holes in the right places, and the clutz in the
glasshouse didn't drop the card stack and get them all mixed up,
the results were pretty reliable. Those glasshouse guys would
transfer the good card sets onto magnetic tape reels.
"I had to laugh when the e-business guys told me about this ASP and
services malarky. We used to call it bureau services but it was for
those firms that couldn't afford their own mainframe - I mean,
millions of dollars was a lot of money back then. Like I said
before, it was all punched card stuff so you posted them off and
waited for the results to come back.
"The guys tell me that what customers want today is the
'one-stop-shop' where you buy all your kit from a single supplier.
So what's new about that? Turnkey systems, we used to call them.
'Out-of-the-box' functionality? Fiddlesticks. The day something
works out of the box will be the day I start using a stupid
non-word like 'functionality'. Out of their box, more like.
"Another thing about this ASP twaddle. Renting someone else's
computer to do your processing isn't new. We used to call it
timeshare. And, while we are on the subject, those thin clients I
have been shown are just slightly more intelligent versions of the
dumb terminals we were seeing from those upstarts at DEC [Digital
Equipment] - I see they eventually got what was coming to
them.
"Everything has changed but nothing has altered that much. True,
more people have access to more and faster computers but the ground
rules are still the same. You guys are just re-inventing the wheel
- and you'd probably claim to have invented that, too, as the
rotational traction device or RTD.