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.

deleted by creator

It was definitely considered piracy by the public at the time. Everyone I knew called it a “legal grey area”, but as far as I know it was legally permissable.

The media companies tried their hardest to make it sound like you were destroying the entire industry and you’d go to jail for life as soon as they caught you.

What makes me mad is the boomers I watched copy rentals and NFL games are the same ones telling me I’m stealing by using an ad blocker.

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.

“don’t have to throw the whole thing out” is what convinced me to get one. I’m not going to make a big difference on my own, but minimizing what I recycle, throw out, or chuck in the basement is still worthwhile.