Past Memories of IT Work

I remember fighting with elm over uuencoded mime attachments. I don't miss those parts of the "old days" one bit. But when YetAnotherMSEmailVirus tears the net a new one, I quietly go back to using mutt until the storm blows over.

There’s no reason every CEO in America shouldn’t expect the company’s computers to work as well as their toilets. Companies that aren’t in the computer industry shouldn’t need large staffs of full-time IT staff any more than they need large staffs of full-time plumbers.

So what's the computer analogy for a clogged toilet, a Denial oS attack? Why is a separate tool required to unclog a toilet? Why do so many bathrooms have signs explaining what can and can't be flushed down the toilet. Is there a Blue Toilet of Death?

Having actually done a fair amount of IT work myself, not by choice but out of necessity with *nix, mac, and win32, I find that statement both hilarious and incredibly over-simplified. If the components of computers were as simple as the component of plumping, not to say that plumping can't be challenging, you would probably see more reliable computers. But as we have expected more and more from computers, they have become more and more complex. This added complexity has increased the amount of maintenance required to run the damn things.

I know I sound just like the IT professionals that John takes to task, "men who are not smart enough to program, but yet wanted a career in computers." But I was a programmer/web geek who had to take over IT duties. It involved running an Exchange 5.5 server. I had nightmares, most of which came true, about that machine. But the Free/Busy time scheduling for 20-30 people was Heaven sent. It replaced "missed" e-mail and a paper calendar taped to each conference room door. Maybe Exchange was a substitute for communication discipline. What ever it was, it worked. People used it. Meetings went smoothly and people showed up on time and there was a dramatic drop-off in the number of arguments over who had a room booked.

Could all this be done with Free or Open software and open protocols? Probably. The standards are all there. Has anyone done it? And by "done it" I mean has anyone built an application that people like to use that does this. I don't mean some crappy web calendar app. I mean a desktop app, that people can use for e-mail and planning their daily business schedule. iCal/vCal, IMAP, SMTP, POP...it's all there. All Microsoft did was make it easy to use. Is it insecure? Of course. But you could most likely strike the insecure features and still maintain the features and ease of use. At least the ones related to Free/Busy.

Which leads to the part where I winced.

The rest of Exchange — the calendaring features, etc. — are widely used, but are not needed. The world functioned just fine in the days before you could click a button in an email message to agree to attend a meeting.

Calendaring (aka Free/Busy Scheduling) is the killer feature of Exchange. I may be biased in my feelings. Single Instance Storage of attachments is also really nice, but the end-user never sees that. Calendaring, in my opinion, is the only reason to use Exchange. The problem is that if you want to use it for calendaring you have to use it for e-mail. If you want to use it for e-mail you have to have a Primary Domain Controller, and so on.

Where am I going with this? Obviously any talk of Exchange dredges up past memories. I agree with John that IT is busted. I think saying "make it work like the toilets" might be harder than he thinks. But as Adam and Dr. Drew like to say, "good times everybody!"