Senior management wanted a some kind of communication platform for store employees. Something that could handle shared, broadcast comms to all employees, but also individualized comms to store managers, and ideally even questionnaire-like forms for surveys and the like. The entire system had to be secure and tightly controlled, e.g. employee A at store 1 shouldn’t be able to email employee B at store 2.

At some point we’d adopted using Lotus Notes at the HQ as platform de jour. (previously we were all in on PowerBuilder apps, remember that?).

It was no surprise, then, when IBM flew a one of our VPs to Cambridge (or maybe Boca Raton as part of another deal…) and he came back and announced we had purchased something like 50,000 seats for Lotus Notes and were implementing it as a store comm system.

A colleague and I were part of the architectural team. We didn’t have much of a formalized practice in those days, but we’d both been involved in the design and implementation of a lot of key store systems, and we weren’t idiots. We pointed out we’d never tested this sort of thing.

The Lotus team suggested installing Notes in a test store. We pointed out we had no compatible Windows equipment in the store. They suggested accessing Notes remotely. I can’t recall how. Unfortunately, our store networking system was Very Small Aperture Terminal satellite-based. High bandwidth, but also high latency, something like 3-4 seconds. Interactive apps over VSAT just didn’t cut it.

Now my memory of all details is a little fuzzy after 30 years, but as I recollect, Notes could effectively work offline, and then synchronize when back online. This was a cool feature for distributing apps and data. So, of course, the Lotus teams said the obvious, “Just purchase a separate server for Notes in the stores, and we can sync to that, and then all access will be local.”

Did I mention this was Retail?

Suffice it to say when we told Sr Mgmt the solution was going to require purchasing a dedicated server for every location (we were growing like crazy those days), the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and the 50K seat deal was cancelled. Someone lost a nice commission.

At the time I didn’t blame IBM. They were just acting on very incomplete information. Our VP, and old MF guy who now had responsibility for “Distributed Systems” as well, should have had an internal review before committing. I suspect he didn’t get any IBM Christmas cards that year.

Did we adopt standard email for comms? Oh, heck no. We rolled our own Frankenstein implementation of a backend and client, replete with our first C app on MVS. That’s a story for another day.

Notes stayed alive as our internal email, etc client for quite a while longer. I even got it running under Red Hat Linux, courtesy of Wine. Eventually the wheel turned, and we moved to something else. Was it better? No.

Thankfully I had a reasonable boss. Apparently the argument, "we can't design UIs, we can recreate how our users actually use our product" hadn't been tried before or at least hadn't been successful. Suffice it to say I put in an order that recreated the UX of our business users.

I shared this news with my peer managers in the department. They followed my tack, and soon enough at least 3 other teams were rocking decent equipment.

Then the VP got wind of it, and said, "No more orders for new equipment until the existing equipment is EOL", or something like that. You know, okay, I get it, we're talking a lot of monitors. But, dammit, people were just a little happier, or maybe just not as pissed off at one thing we could control.

I didn't even try to expense the 43" 4K TV I used for a monitor at home.

I especially remember that he played "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" - my wife and I still talk about it.

In 1983 I purchased my first personal computer, an Apple //e. By then we had an entire lab of Apples and Franklins, but I no longer needed to stay. The setup at home was more convenient, but the limitations imposed by the previous setup had a powerful focusing effect: hand-written programs, carefully reviewed and mentally simulated.

Fun times. Thank you, Steve, Woz, et al.

Aside from the subject matter I was not prepared for the size of the work. It is one thing to see on a monitor or handheld screen, and quite another to see it full-scale. It is a qualitative change, not merely a quantitative one. So while this high fidelity picture allows one to study technique, color, and changes he made while painting, I think it misses the point. I say this without having read much commentary or critique of the work, but I imagine Picasso was so overwhelmed by Guernica that he wanted any viewer to overwhelmed, too. So if they do move it, I hope it is in a similar setting - in a moderately sized room, on a wall not much larger than the work itself, inescapable.

As ridiculous as it may sound, if you plan on visiting, plan two outings: one for Guernica, and one for the rest of the museum. That room and work are emotionally exhausting, and at least for my wife and I the intensity of that wing required a cooldown period.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aVO7GAwxnQ

I’ve mainly seen “BLE beacon” used to refer to types of devices, especially ones that primarily advertise.

There are some devices, like BLE-based remote controls, that advertise very frequently, I assume to reduce latency between a user’s action and response by the receiving device. It makes for a very noisy environment if you’re playing at home and not filtering based on MAC, etc.

Subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, if you are a user who has subscribed to the paid tier of the Service, Suno hereby assigns to you all of its right, title and interest in and to any Output owned by Suno and generated from Submissions made by you through the Service during the term of your paid-tier subscription. If you are a user of the free tier of the Service then, as between you and Suno, Suno owns all Output generated from Submissions made by you through the Service, and, subject to your compliance with the terms of this Agreement, Suno grants you a license to use such Output solely for your lawful, internal, and non-commercial purposes, provided that you give attribution credit to Suno in each case.

I recall writing programs large enough to require use of the overlay facility, which essentially let you page in different parts of your program under DOS.

I also recall meeting David Intersimone, a great ambassador of Borland, sometime in the 80s - might have been later 80s - when he visited my university as a guest of the local ACM chapter.

And even further down the road: make sure to account downtime in your production schedule for mold maintenance.

I see others commenting on registration, certification and approval matters and I’ll only say: do not underestimate the time and cost of that for a global product. This landscape changes all of the time. One minute a country will accept evidence of an FCC filing; the next minute they require in country testing with a local authority.

In 1982/3 I worked for a local data processing / software consultancy / hardware reseller doing a variety of odd jobs. One day the owner came in and said they were going to become a reseller of a new computer, a Victor Technologies machine, as computers and terminals on IBM System 3X machines via Perle protocol converters. I remapped the keyboard of the Victor to allow the right shift to serve as a 5251 Enter key.

Victor had rented space in a new office tower and held a grand opening a couple of weeks later. I demonstrated our wares. There wasn’t that much interest, so I wandered around all of the display booths, learned what they were demoing, and in some cases took over. I remember 3 distinct features: 1) variable speed disk drives, which meant the Victor could store more data than am IBM PC. 2) a built-in codec for recording sound, especially speech, and aiding playback. 3) a stylus/touch-screen monitor option, which could be used for CAD etc.

I had an option to buy a machine for half price. I was an Apple IIe guy at the time and couldn’t have afforded it anyway, but it was a sweet machine. Sadly, that didn’t matter much, and Victor went out of business soon enough.