Tag: history

Keep Calm and Carry On

This is a response to an item on my friend Bill Buchan’s blog on the above. A lady appeared on “The Antiques Road Show” a few weeks ago with a stack of originals of the famous World War II poster entitled “Keep Calm and Carry On”. They’d been issu…

This is a response to an item on my friend Bill Buchan’s blog on the above.

A lady appeared on “The Antiques Road Show” a few weeks ago with a stack of originals of the famous World War II poster entitled “Keep Calm and Carry On”. They’d been issued to a relative who was the postmistress in a small village but she never got the instruction to put them up. Apparently, it was only to be put up in the event of an invasion.

As the invasion never occurred, most got destroyed, but somehow hers just got left in a back room.

It raised an interesting debating point about supply and demand. A YouTube video linked to by Bill gave the story of how a bookshop found an original and started to sell copies. I don’t know how much they sold for, but it was probably fairly cheap.

An original however, given its (now) iconic status and scarcity, is worth far more. This lady had about 20 originals (as I recall), so: does she sell them one at a time over a period of many years to get a high individual price, or does she sell them all as a collection?

 

Three disks to compile a program. Those were days.

I’ve just been reading an article on one of my favourite software development blogs: Joel on Software. It was a post on the importance of doing Daily Builds when you are developing software, but the point that jumped out was a reference back to th…

I’ve just been reading an article on one of my favourite software development blogs: Joel on Software.  It was a post on the importance of doing Daily Builds when you are developing software, but the point that jumped out was a reference back to the days when PC workstations were equipped with floppy disks.

Joel referred to the IBM Pascal compiler that came on three floppy disks; with each compiler pass on a separate floppy. 

Blimey, I remember those days too. Compiling a non-trivial program took ages. I was developing programs that modelled real-world events like packet switching networks: and these were certainly non-trivial!

Does your software development history go back to the 80’s? Do you remember the agony, and the ecstasy of developing software in those days?