When I first started teaching IT architecture, we had an exercise on designing streaming video to cinemas.
With available infrastructure, it would have to be streamed once the week before because not enough reliable bandwidth to do it live for each performance.
Now we do it live to individuals,.
@EricLawton Oh for sure, and we're sold hard on the amazing things we can do now. My phone can record 4k video at 60fps! I can play beautiful 3D games! LLMs will harness the power of an infinite number of monkeys on my behalf!
Which is why I find it interesting that against all this "amazing! cool!" the actul experience of using computers to get boring things done has often got so much worse.
@thomasbeagle @EricLawton it takes my Mac so long to make a new folder I have to *wait* before I start typing a name for it
@EricLawton @bentorkington @thomasbeagle A loooong time ago, when I was working in a 3270-heavy environment, we would initiate new analysts by making requests for offline datasets.
The catalog had a rough correlation (by dataset srcid) to the physical location in the tape library ("TapeLand" we called it). The game was to make a request for the tape located furthest from the operator console. As you asked for the tape, an alert showed up on the console and the analyst would have to race off into TapeLand to get the tape, bring it back to the tape drives, get it threaded and read into a mounted dataset.
Leaderboard was reported surreptitiously on a separate TSO panel we wrote specially for the purpose.
Furthest tape won. Good times!
@EricLawton @bentorkington @thomasbeagle
Those were the days. We didn't know how good we had it.
@thomasbeagle @EricLawton the end user experience was pretty good, but waiting for the turn around of batch compilations of the cobol and the delivery of the printed listing of the cobol program with it's missing full stop errors were a bit of a chore sometimes. :)
Fixing the errors using a terminal rather than replacing punch cards was a huge step forward!
@Glodav @EricLawton Thankfully we were a bit more modern than that! (Although my dad was a Cobol programmer in those days).
But our developers loved it when I deployed Windows PCs for workstations so that they could finally have multiple terminal sessions without relying on screen.
@thomasbeagle @EricLawton I feel privileged to have been exposed to the early days of it all, and the gradual changes have have been exciting to see. Sometimes I feel like a frog in a pan of water on the stove, and I should have jumped out a while ago.