Recent Best of…

Our "best" articles of years past.

Dec 2024

Best of 2024: Lowering the Rent Floor

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Businesses always want to save money. But boy, they can sometimes come up with some hare-brained ways of doing it. Original --Remy

Things weren't looking good for IniOil. It was the 1980s in the US: greed was good, anti-trust laws had been literally Borked, and financialization and mergers were eating up the energy industry. IniOil was a small fish surrounded by much larger fish, and the larger fish were hungry.

Gordon was their primary IT person. He managed a farm of VAXes and other minicomputers, which geologists used to do complicated models to predict where oil might be found. In terms of utilization, the computer room was arguably the most efficient space in the company: those computers may have been expensive, but they were burning 24/7 to find more oil to extract.


Best of 2024: Check Your Email

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As we recap some of the best moments of the year, make sure you check this report, which is very important, so important the entire company has to stop what it's doing. Original. --Remy

Branon's boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency.

"Did we change anything this weekend?"


Best of 2024: A Bit About the HP3000

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As we enter that little gap between Christmas and New Year's, we explore some of the highlights of 2024. We start with this historical computing story. And unlike the subject, this shipped ready to read (and reprint). --Remy

Today's anonymously submitted story is a case where the WTF isn't the code itself, per se. This arguably could be a CodeSOD, and we'll get to the code, but there's so much more to the story.

Our submitter, let's call them Janice, used to work for a financial institution with a slew of legacy systems. One such system was an HP3000 minicomputer. "Mini", of course, meant "refrigerator sized".