[HN Gopher] Debugging Lotus 1-2-3 by fax
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Debugging Lotus 1-2-3 by fax
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 68 points
Date : 2025-03-31 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| chiffre01 wrote:
| Mandatory link to 1-2-3 running on Linux
|
| https://github.com/taviso/123elf?tab=readme-ov-file
| mattl wrote:
| I used to work at the Free Software Foundation. I would get a lot
| of letters from prisoners who wanted copies of our books, people
| asking for a printed copy of the GPL and Google once sent
| thousands of AdWords flyers with seeds embedded in the paper
|
| Why thousands? They'd attempted to figure out the address for a
| bunch of small websites and their search had concluded that they
| were all run by the FSF.
|
| They were not. They were all Joomla websites with the GPL linked
| in the footer. I always thought that would be my strangest tale
| but no..
|
| Someone once sent me a 10-12 page fax with printed pages of
| gnu.org with handwritten translations on it. A few days later
| they faxed me asking if I had received the pages and wanting to
| know when they were going to be on the website.
|
| I tracked down their email address, and put them in touch with
| the translator for their language. Again via email.
|
| Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be
| easier.
|
| Does anyone else remember the email to fax relay of tpc.int? Used
| that more than once in the mid-90s at my first job which had a
| heavy fax culture as most of our clients were not yet using the
| internet. One of my first jobs was getting the office onto a
| single Internet connection (and provider) and then getting a
| reseller account for our ISP setup so we could offer dial up and
| IMAP email to our customers.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Does anyone else remember the email to fax relay of tpc.int?_
|
| Not that specific one, but I remember using others. Naturally,
| I can remember the names of none of them.
|
| The one I thought was the most magical was the one that allowed
| me to send a fax from my fairly ordinary non-smart Nokia GSM
| phone. In the days when I was a road warrior ("digital nomad"
| in Millennial), this was a godsend since fax machines were more
| common than e-mail.
| amichal wrote:
| One of my first legit independent contractor jobs was a
| background job for coldfusion-based website that needed to get
| partners to update their data periodically. The business had
| figured out that their building supply partners were more
| responsive to faxes than emails and had a desktop window
| machine with a fax-modem used for that. A quick "micro-service"
| in classic asp to bridge the website to the desktop machine and
| they made it through the last few years of common usage of
| faxing for these kinds of things.
| bluedino wrote:
| > Apparently they felt that a visual representation would be
| easier.
|
| Screenshots, printed out, and then faxed, with a question or
| remark hand-written on the page, I'd have to go check my office
| mailbox for issues submitted by 2-3 users. And this was only
| 10-15 years ago.
|
| You know could paste the screenshot into an email...nevermind.
| We took orders via fax at that time so I guess it made sense?
| cube00 wrote:
| I'd almost forgotten what it's like for a blog post to embrace
| that it's a short story and not drone on for pages to pad it out.
| pfoof wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily call it debugging, more like "remote
| helpdesk". Either way, this is a brilliant way to "compress"
| instructions.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| It sort of was debugging because I'd written a ton of stuff for
| them in 1-2-3 (on site). This was their accounting system for a
| small business and I was "debugging" something rather simple:
| they weren't getting all the columns printed on their dot
| matrix.
| shrubble wrote:
| I like it! My own proudest moment was walking a non technical
| user through using "vi" to edit a config file on a SCO Unix
| server... over the phone.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Faxes took about 45 seconds per page. I think this particular bug
| could have been resolved with a 90 second phone conversation. The
| fax cost savings were small, but still a neat story.
| wazoox wrote:
| OK, story time. I probably mentioned already that I did the
| computer graphics for World Cup 98 worldwide TV broadcast. The
| setup was using two SGI Octane MXI, controlled from a PC running
| a custom application driving the two Octanes, on each of the ten
| stadiums across France. On each site a local team managed the
| system; one guy using the graphics remote control PC in the OB
| truck, a couple of other guys entering manually statistic data on
| other remote control PCs, and another monitoring everything and
| sorting out problems.
|
| For a lot of reasons, the development of the remote control
| application (written in Visual Basic 4.2 IIRC) was a painful
| death march that had began a too few short weeks before WC98 went
| live, weeks during which I've worked 100 hours a week and more,
| sleeping under my desk on which were the development Octane and
| PCs; I suppose many can relate.
|
| As the remote control application was so late, it evolved almost
| daily during the World Cup; we basically debugged it at night,
| compiled and tested it during the day, pushed the binaries to our
| central server (an Origin 2000) through ISDN, binaries that the
| on-site team had to download and install before each and every
| match, after calling me to know the eventual problems to sort
| out.
|
| The main point was that all features weren't ready from the
| beginning; during the first few weeks, the daily release of the
| software could only manage the things that were supposed to be
| happening in the field.
|
| So one night I was (finally) home and I suddenly saw a match
| starting live on TV, in Lyon. And I realised Carlos (the local
| team manager in Lyon) hadn't called me about the daily software
| update. So I called Carlos while the match was beginning : "No
| worries", he said. "Yesterday's software worked fine, and I know
| you're tired so I managed it myself". "OK, but did you install
| today's update?" "What for? Yesterday's release was fine". "It
| was all fine yesterday", I replied, "but tonight is the first
| match which can have extra time and penalties. _Yesterday 's
| release doesn't manage penalties_ so I really hope we won't need
| it". Yeah, you know how this ends already...
|
| Because you know, downloading the software through ISDN and
| installing it wasn't really an option once the match had begun...
|
| What do you think happened? I watched the game going on and score
| stuck 0 to 0... And going to extra time... Still 0 - 0 at the end
| of extra time... Penalties! Time for improvising, live in front
| of about 2 billions spectators, isn't that nice? From that moment
| and until the end, I was on the phone with Carlos. First, to
| allow for a proper display, we had to reset the score to track
| the penalties like actual goals.
|
| Then at last came the tough moment, displaying the final score,
| by filling in all data manually. I could only see the result
| live, on my home TV, hoping for the best... "OK, as the remote
| control software won't work, you'll have to manipulate the Octane
| directly" (which of course was never envisioned, and he had
| absolutely zero experience of). "Hit exactly all the keys as I
| tell you : on the numpad, hit 5000, then enter. Hit tab twice,
| press 3. Hit tab once, press 4. Hit tab twice, press 4. Hit tab
| once, press 3. Hit tab 3 times, press 0. Hit tab once, press 0.
| Press Ctrl + *. Press Ctrl + Enter. Call the OB truck and tell
| them to send in the picture".
|
| It went all right in the end, but boy it was tiring.
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(page generated 2025-03-31 23:01 UTC)