May 30, 2007
Dear Everyone:
Heads up! Tomorrow will be a Blue Moon. The definition of a “blue moon” is the second full moon in a single month. The first full moon was May 2nd. Tomorrow will begin another full moon. They are very rare, hence the expression, “It only happens once in a blue moon.”
In other news, “Jeannie” and I went up to “Oakley”
last Saturday to see our cousin “Perry” and get new eye glasses for
“Jeannie” who had finally gotten her eyes examined.
“Perry”, it turns out, in addition to owning his optician’s
office, has become something of a
genealogist.
He has scanned dozens, if not hundreds, of old family photographs
into his computer. He showed
us pictures of our maternal great-grandparents who had emigrated to
On the work front, we were supposed to have a Design Session this morning with some Information Technology people, but it turned into a Review Session instead. This means that tomorrow, I’ll be presenting a Design Session having only seen one in the past. It should be interesting. Moreover, it will be in “Martinez”. Those of you familiar with the Bay Area may realize that “Martinez” is quite a ways from “Pleasanton”. So, a long drive to get there, a presentation I’ve never given before, then a long drive back in the evening. Another reason to do the Weekly Letter tonight while I have time.
Part of this presentation is to explain the “history of the Global Information Link” (or GIL for short.) In the beginning was the Mainframe. And the way it worked was this: You made offerings to the High Priests of the Mainframe and in return you were granted access to your data. And life was good. And there was a popular saying that “no one ever got fired for buying an IBM.” And the cost of the Mainframe was spread out over a broad base of users (the cost being your offering to the High Priests of the Mainframe.)
But then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, something began to happen. People started finding these boxes on their desks called “personal computers”. They didn’t have to deal with the High Priests of the Mainframe, they could keep their data in the PC. And, as more people abandoned the Mainframe in favor of the PCs, the broad base of users begin to grow smaller; and the cost to each individual began to grow larger.
As the costs went up, it created incentives for more people to “dive off the Mainframe”. But people quickly discovered that they had trouble sharing their data. So they began to form “networks”. The first network was the “Sneaker Network”. You copied your data to a “floppy disk” (and they were floppy, being very flexible and prone to breakage.) Then you “put on your sneakers and run to the other computer” to transfer the data to the new computer.
In time, special computers called “file servers” came into being, specially designed to hold many different people’s data. And anarchy ensued. People had different software applications. Word versus WordPerfect. Lotus 1-2-3 versus Excel. Paradox versus Access. And some people had the same software, but different versions. Word went from version 1.0 to version 2.0, then jumped ahead to version 6.0. Older versions couldn’t read documents created in newer versions.
Eventually, someone tried to bring some order out of the chaos by coming up with something called the Common Operating Environment (COE). Groups would agree on a platform and standardized applications. That way, anyone in the group could use anyone else’s machine to work at because they all had, more or less, the same stuff.
The COE caught on. By 1998, a survey revealed over 42 separate and distinct versions of COE throughout the company. It was time to take it to the next level. Time to bite the bullet and get everyone on the same page, even if it killed them.
And the Global Information Link (GIL) was born. The rest, as they say, is history.
On the other hand, the group I’ll be working with tomorrow works in a department called “Technology Marketing” and they all seem to have “DNA” in their work group name. So they probably don’t remember a time before GIL and I can skip the ancient history and move directly to the “ice breaker”: “How many mergers have you been through?”
My guess: None.
Here’s a fun one: Try asking someone under 30 what a stenographer is. Don’t be surprised if they say “some kind of dinosaur?”
Love, as always,
Pete
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