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It's a holiday in the US today, so we're taking a trip into the past for a haunting classic about how things used to be. Original. -- Remy
Greg never thought he’d meet a real-life mentat.
“We’re so happy to have you aboard,” said Jordan, the CEO of IniTech. She showed Greg to the back end of the office, to a closed door marked with just one word: Frank. Jordan, not bothering to knock, opening the door.
Tyler G.’s “engagement manager”, Sheila, had a new gig for him. The Global Chemical Society, GCS, had their annual conference coming up, and their system for distributing the schedules was a set of USB thumb-drives with self-hosting web apps.
“You’ll be working with two GCS representatives, Jeff and Graham,” Sheila explained. “They’ll provide you with last year’s source code, and the data for this year’s schedule. You’ll need to wire them up.”
It was a mandatory change control meeting. Steven S.’s department, a research branch of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health in Belgium, assembled in a cramped meeting room without enough chairs for everyone. Camille, head of IT, was nonplussed.
“These orders come directly from Security,” she began. “Just last month, we monitored over a hundred attempts to break into the HCP.” The Home Care Platform was a database of citizens’ requests for doctors’ visits, prescription coverage, etc. Steven’s team had developed a mobile app that gave citizens access to HCP’s records.
Early magnetic storage was simple in its construction. The earliest floppy disks and hard drives used an iron (III) oxide surface coating a plastic film or disk. Later media would use cobalt-based surfaces, providing a smaller data resolution than iron oxide, but wouldn’t change much.
Samuel H. never had think much about this until he met Micah.
Fresh out of college and out of money, Johan K. started work at Midgard Manufacturing as a junior developer. His supervisor Ragna made it clear: he would only be responsible for coding error handlers.
“Our plant equipment is several decades old,” she said, “and we have to rely on the manufacturer-provided documentation for adequate coverage. To be honest, none of the senior developers want to bother. So instead of bothering one of them, you’ll be doing it.”
WT Durham had never met Bruce, former sales executive and new COO of Prepackaged Pixels, before he paid a visit to WT’s department. They were responsible for maintaining the licensing API for the company’s toolkit bundle, which included their prized platform-agnostic GUI. The bundle was used for internal projects as well as for third-party licensing, and customers often bought the entire bundle just to use the GUI. Bruce wasn’t too happy about that.
“We’ve conducted several customer surveys,” Bruce said. “Two-thirds of our customer base only want the GUI toolkit, not the rest of our bundle.”
Dominique finished her instant cup of ramen, her third day straight. She and the other developers at Bento had gone a month without pay as they finished the beta version of their only application: a browser for promotional materials of yet-to-be-released merchandise.
Her cellphone rang. It was CEO Stephen, who was wooing investors with a demo. “How hard is it to block a user from capturing a screen image?”
Lex was an employee at GreyBox in the late 90s, a PC-repair shop inside of a large electronics chain. He had spent the entire morning handling phone calls from customer after customer. Each of the calls was supposed to go to his co-worker Gerald, but Gerald hadn’t been picking up his phone. Each caller complained that Gerald had taken in their computer for repairs and not actually done the repairs.
“I brought my laptop in yesterday,” one caller, a wheezy old man, said, “and the young man behind the counter just took the laptop and said, ‘come back in an hour’. He went into the back room, and when I came back, he looked like he had been drinking. You know, red faced and sweaty. And the laptop smelled funny- like corn chips. And it wasn’t fixed!”