Yeah, it was all tapes. We only had to use them once when I worked there: after finding out the UPS connected to the mainframe was a dud. And then it really was roulette because the first two tapes were unreadable, so we ended up with three week old data.

I’d believe it’s real. In 2016 I was at a company trying to migrate off an old IBM mainframe and green screens. It wasn’t like an airline with complex or critical code; it was just a barely functional ERP for a warehouse. Source control was the furthest thing from their minds. Some companies and IT departments are very reluctant to change, regardless of how much time and money it save.

It gets worse if you use Microsoft D365 AX products. Then you have to provision an entire Build server for builds which has to run Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10. To do a build you run a pipeline in Azure DevOps, which runs the compiler in a full Visual Studio 2019 environment, which has to run on a special Azure virtual environment running Windows 10 hosted by Microsoft. It’s so fragile.

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Very interesting. It would certainly make doom scrolling harder. Email always feels more personal, like each message was sent specifically to me for a reason. As opposed to feeds, which feels like looking at cars as they drive by.

I think this system pushes against those boundaries. This sort of concrete brainstorming at the edges is such a crucial part of software evolution, so thank you.