Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Smoke Signals? Telegraphy? Carrier Pigeons?

How were large, complex (are there any other kind?) geographically-scattered software projects managed before companies finally got IM on corporate networks?

Why, over email, of course.

So how were these projects managed before the arrival of email?

God, I don't *want* to remember.

6 comments:

Lekhni said...

Fedexed Floppy disks? Let me guess - there weren't that many geographically scattered software projects back then either, right?

blewgenes said...

the whole team huddles around a phone after booking a trunk-call, and takes turns talking to the key people on the other side.

Then presenting all the details on a board/OHP screen to the local team.
[like in a Kurosawa movie]

maybe the interfaces between the modules were better designed.

and no wonder only the top brains were working on such things....instead of every random eenu, meenu and peeku like now :-)

FĂ«anor said...

Lekhni's got it, I think. I remember sending drives by Fedex even when we had email because the links were just so pathetic - and this despite a dedicated link between our US headquarters and our Gurgaon frontier outpost. Then we got the Clearcase multisite and so we were able to make global syncs of the entire software tree wherever we wanted. Still, it was quite a headache.

??! said...

Tele-conferences!

km said...

Lekhni: That's so true - projects were rarely run from multiple locations. (And I remember 5-1/4 disks. Oh God.)

Blewgenes: Trunk-calls? Like when the manager had one phone line inside his office and that office would get locked at 6PM?

Feanor: 64KPBS link - state of the art. It sucked. Not to mention UUencoding emails.

??!: True passive-aggressives don't code on tele-conferences :)

km said...

ugh, *KBPS*.