Isn’t it insane how fast the tech industry has been changing?

This guy shares a story from the floppy disk era!

Check out what happened.

Shipping Woes- Don’t schedule releases if your requirements are not final.

Back in the floppy disk days, I worked for a small company that sold key software to the telecom industry for ordering telecom connections between companies. Our software worked in MS DOS and very early versions of Linux.

It took 12 5 1/4″ floppys or 6 3 1/2″ floppys to ship the software, and we had to customize parts of each distribution for each client.

He explains how things work…

200 copies of the 5 1/4″, shipped to 50 companies, and 100 copies of 3 1/2″ – shipped to about 30 companies, and there was overlap – some companies had 5 1/4″ and 3 1/2″ drives.

Initially we had everyone in the company duplicating the disks on their own desktop computers, which took a lot of coordination -i.e. “Sally – here is the master for disk 3, please make 100 copies of it.

Fred- here is the master for disk 2,…” We did ultimately get a drive duplicator with the auto-feeder attachment which helped.

The industry had a forum where they defined the field formats, structure, meaning, validations, etc.

This is where it gets bad…

For some unknown reason, they decided to have their industry forum meeting the week that the last approved spec was due to be implemented.

I had spent the weekend at the office duplicating disks, going to CompUsa to buy more disks because things failed, printing labels, performing the customization of each client’s disks, printing shipping labels, and taking short naps in the one couch we had at the office.

Monday morning arrives, I drive the packages to Fedex, thinking – time to go home and unwind.

When I got back to the office, the office manager told me that the people our company had who went to the convention needed to get a hold of me immediately.

He knew something was up…

Since cell phones were not a big thing yet, I had to wait until they called me back, so I hung around, playing tetris for a while.

When we spoke, they told me that the industry members had an emergency change for the release I literally just shipped, and two fields on the first screen had to be changed because several of the major telecom company’s can’t accept the values in that field.

So I spend 5 minutes making the code change, about an hour running the incremental compiling (A full recompile would take 12 hours), run the tool to split the code across the 12 5 1/4″ floppies, and the 6 3 1/2″ floppies, go back to CompUSA and buy a few more stacks of floppies, fire up the drive duplicator and start printing more labels.

UH OH…

Monday is now gone, and I still had to call each client we shipped the software to tell them to just toss what we shipped.

On Tuesday, I get some other people in the office to organize the labeling and packing of the new software, getting it ready to ship – then my phone rings….. If you guessed that there is now another new requirement, you would be right- even though the clients still had to have the new software working in their hands by the end of the week.

This requirement was more complex because it involved conditional validation across multiple screens- think: If on screen A you put a Y in field X and on screen B, there was a C in field Y, you then skip screen C and go to Screen D and only allow ‘U or V’ in field Z.

I had to consider the consequences of what happened if they were upgrading from the old version where screen C was already there for the order, do I clear it out, etc…

He had been working hard for this…

It took me late into Tuesday night before I had code I thought was acceptable, and the only people who could actually test it were at the convention, so I kicked off the compiling, and packing to the disks, ripped the floppies out of the packages we had ready to ship, and kicked off the duplicating process again.

Wednesday was pretty quiet, but my boss and I decided to hold off on shipping everything – we could still ship on Thursday, and have it in our client’s hands on Friday- though we had one customer who was getting antsy because they had some sort of automation software they had to customize after they got the software we shipped.

Thursday comes, and we find out there are a dozen other changes that will need to be made, so we told our people at the convention we can’t get it done and out to everyone by Friday.

He knew he had to take some action!

They came back and said it was government mandates, etc… so I lined up the entire office to be a production line, assigned some people from other departments and the office staff job roles to be ready to do the second the code compilation was ready, grabbed two really experienced developers (One a PHD, and one wrote the initial Linux drivers for ATA CD Roms) who didn’t work on this code but knew what they were doing, and asked them to manage the customizations.

We finally got everything done, had someone order me Thai food from my favorite restaurant 20 minutes away, and got it all shipped out.

Friday was full of calls from the clients asking when their disks will arrive, and we did have a few quality control issues- some of the individual disks had write errors, but the clients generally had multiple copies so they could clone the good disk. All was well.

That’s INSANE!

Until…….

Late Friday afternoon, the company pushing the changes in the industry forum came back and told everyone they missed their release deadline to promote their code for that weekend, and that they could only accept orders using the old specification until their next release window – 2 weeks away.

Fortunately, our code was still good, but we had to call all of our customers to tell them – don’t use this software for 2 weeks, keep using the old version.

After this release, we also updated our hardware requirements and dropped support for the 5 1/4″ floppies, but offered CDs instead. The CD burner and labeler were well worth the investment.

YIKES! That sounds like a lot of trouble at work.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user shares a story from their previous job…

This user shares how things were when they joined a startup.

This user knows the digital age is our worst enemy…

This user shares what happened after they made a big purchase.

This user knows the industry needs to bring in some changes.

Someone needs to take a break!

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.