{Cheese and Beans}

I will be taking part in NaBloWriMo again this year (also known as “National Blog Writing Month”) – the annual challenge to write a blog post on every day throughout November. It sounds easy, but I can assure you from years gone by – it’s not.

The first few days are great fun – writing about the minutiae of each day, sharing your annoyances, your joys, and perhaps a few private thoughts. You quickly begin to wonder if things are worth sharing – and conceal more and more.

Of course NaBloWriMo is aped from the rather famous NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month – an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during November. I attempted it last year, but life and work conspired to make it impossible.

The one great thing that does come out of NaBloWriMo is new friends. Of all the fellow bloggers I now read, virtually all of them came from past Novembers, taking part in the forums, and reading the various blogs of others taking part.

If you have a blog, why not think about it. If you ever find yourself thinking “I should write about this” while dodging the slings and arrows of your day, now is your chance. Make November memorable – you know you want to.

I’m pulling out of NaNoWriMo. I had no time yesterday to write anything, no time today to write anything, will have no time tomorrow to write anything, and no time on Tuesday to write anything.

It’s just bloody ridiculous.

Networking the computers turned out to be both easier and more difficult than I had imagined. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 made it easier than I had perhaps thought, and cheaper too. Mid 90s networking hardware made it ridiculously error prone, difficult, and liable to fail at the worst moments.

The word “Network” typically conjurs up an image of many computers connected together. The company I worked for owned one set of Microsoft Windows floppy disks.

Floppy disks (for those who entered the work arena after the late 1990s) were the main method of software delivery before CDs became cheap in the late 90s and early 2000s. They are interesting from a historical perspective because they were categorically not floppy, and held an enormous 1500Kb of data – about a 400th the amount of a CDROM. Nerds reading this will be holding their hand up, shouting “what about 5.25″ floppies?” (which really were floppy), and bearded Unix and CPM admins will be shouting “I remember 8″ floppies!”.

Getting back on track, the company owned one set of Windows install disks, installed with no thought whatsoever to licensing on every machine that came through the door. Windows didn’t automatically come with the computer back in those days – there were (shock horror) other options.

First option was Microsoft Disk Operating System – known the world over as MS-DOS. DOS applications were stable, ran like lightning, but didn’t play well with others – you could only run one thing at a time. There was a competing, compatible system called DRDOS, which ran faster, and was more efficient, but they eventually got sat on by the giant from Redmond (who we must remember at this point was only a playground bully – not yet the all conquering marketing machine we now know).

The second mainstream option was Microsoft Windows 3.1. , installed on countless home computers the world over. Windows provided a graphical interface to your computer and ran on top of MS-DOS. It allowed the magical ability to run more than one application at once within “Windows”. It had a slightly bigger brother called “Windows for Workgroups 3.11″- which in the bizarre naming scheme attributed to Windows, and continued to this day, may as well have been called “Windows 3.5″ – because it was.

Workgroups made sharing files and printers much easier than it would otherwise have been.

Another option that also existed was IBM OS/2. Once upon a time IBM and Microsoft worked together on a new 32 bit operating system that was to be “the future”. It was a brave, and bold move. eventually killed in the same way the early Mac had been; Microsoft fell out with IBM – but not before secretly building their own version of OS/2 – Windows. The crying shame was that OS/2 was years ahead of Windows in just about all respects.

Striking parallels with the great video format wars of the 1980s, Microsoft spent their money on marketing rather than making Windows better, so therefore won. The better product lost – to the detriment of us all. Granted, OS/2 was massively more expensive, and none of your old software could be guaranteed to work, but it promised true 32 bit computing. In laymans terms this is similar to the supercar debate. Most computers are capable of far more than they ever achieve – similar to using a Ferrari to collect the shopping. OS/2 provided a conduit through which the hardware could be set free.

Meanwhile, we all used Microsoft Windows like the fools that we were.

Behind the entire Windows gloss and sheen, we still had the same computers we had been using since the late 1980s. The architecture was still being dictated by IBM, and perhaps most importantly, USB had not been invented.

We take “plug and play” for granted now. In 1995, it was a pipe dream. Connecting a computer to a network involved taking the system unit to pieces, inserting new circuit boards, and physically configuring wiring and settings on the boards for the computer to once again work correctly (which they frequently didn’t). Any hardware you added within the beige box would argue with anything it possible could – forcing you to remove the lid and tinker some more.

The operating system didn’t “see things” either. You not only had to install drivers to educate Windows how to talk to a device, you had to tell it where the device was in it’s imaginary world – as configured by the wires and jumpers you just monkeyed with. These mysterious settings were called Interrupt Requests, and Addresses, and they were known to drive sane system administrators up the wall.

Networking computers was another layer of luck, complexity and buggeration.

In order for two computers to talk to each other, they both needed “network cards”. The standard back in the day – and still today – was Ethernet. Granted, it wasn’t as fast as now, but it was essentially the same technology that was invented off the back of the Arpanet many moons previously, which eventually became what we now know as “The Internet”.

The world owes an awful lot to two gentlemen – Vint Cerf, and Bob Caan. I’ll let you look them up.

One of the more colourful stories from the advent of ethernet comes from the lab where the first implementation of was developed. It was late because the genius engineer working on the circuitboard got bored with what he was doing, and thought it might be a good idea to start testing the sound reflectivity of the ceiling tiles in his office. This story may or may not be an urban myth, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.

On a wicked parallel (and rat hole), our new office starter, Halley, eventually lost her job because she started filing work she found boring underneath her desk. The papers were discovered during the christmas break, and I found myself wondering why she was in tears after I wished her a happy new year… turns out she was emptying her desk.

Putting a network card in an early 1990s PC was fun. You not only had to buy a card that would fit the internal connectors (there were several different shapes and sizes); you also had to pray that the constructor of the machine had left you enough IRQ or address space to configure the damn thing. If all went well, the machine would start up, the driver software would load, and the light on the back of the box would start blinking – saying a repeated “hello?” to the unknown wider world. If you were unlucky, you would hear several loud beep noises. Computer language for “you’re shagged”.

Ensuring a computer still had a sensible quantity of useable memory left after starting was akin to the power-up procedure agonised over by Ken Mattingley aboard the ground simulator of the Apollo 13 capsule. Memory management was a black art I became particularly adept at – and quite possibly the most boring subject imaginable to impress people with at parties – not that you ever got invited to any parties of course…

With two computers sat on my desk – one at either end – and all the requisite 10BaseT connectors in place, I started crossing fingers, touching wood, and praying to various deities.

It worked!

If you had everything just so – which it appeared I had done by blind luck – the computers could see each other. The next few minutes were filled with air punching, and demonstrations of copying files back and forth for anybody who would take an interest.

“Why would we want to do that?”

Sian didn’t look convinced. She got the forced demo while collecting mugs to make a round of coffees.

“It would mean Sam could open the letters Halley writes and approve them.”

“But I can print it out and give it to him”

“This is quicker though – look – bang – it’s there”

“I don’t know – by the time I’ve figured out how to do all that, I could have printed it and walked down here.”

I knew I was on a hiding to nothing.

Email and shared calendars had not become the selling points of networking yet. In 1995 very few people had internet connections at work or home – let alone email accounts. Of course I had one, but I was the only person in the real world that I knew with one.

Early steps on bulletin boards – the predecessor of social networks – had opened my eyes to the concept of “real” and “internet” friends. I counted lots of people all over the world as “internet” friends, and yet knew deep down that I would never meet them face to face.

Having figured out the basics, I started looking in an office supply catalogue for ethernet cable. We were going to need kilometres of the stuff. Looking around the office, I had no clue where we would hide it either. In reality, it would never be concealed or hidden – doomed to lay underneath desks for the duration off the company’s existence.

Given that any broken point on a BNC network cable causes the entire network to fail, you can imagine the hilarity that ensued when people stood chairs or tables on it.

“Jon! Damon has crashed again…”

“No he hasn’t – it’s working fine on my computer here.”

“Well mine isn’t. Come on – pull your finger out – we’re losing money here!”

“Okay”

I then set about following the cable up the office – more often than not finding that George or Darren had moved their desk or filing cabinet and broken the cable. They never learned.

In these days of enterprise grade open source database servers such as MySQL, it’s easy to forget where we came from – a world inhabited by the rumoured powerhouse that was Foxpro (which nobody could afford), and Microsoft Access – which Microsoft had built out of spite to destroy the fortunes of Ashton Tate when they wouldn’t sell them Foxpro.

Of course, Microsoft later did buy FoxPro – at a vastly reduced price – and eventually threw it away.

Probably not a good idea to say no to Microsoft.

Running across our Heath Robinson network, Microsoft Access worked (unbelievably), and let many people look at the same data at the same time as each other. Unfortunately any sign of difficulty along the inter-computer telegraph wires caused it to go through an internal mailaise similar to a brain tumor.

Sure, the tumor could be removed, but it meant taking the database away to database hospital (my computer) for brain surgery – meaning nobody could use it until it was all better.

In the end we narrowed down the causal factors for data corruption to snails farts, how the weather felt, and which direction Worzel Gummidge had fallen in the closing credits of his show last weekend.

One morning while wandering through the streets of Witney on my way to the office, something in my head told me to stop off at the newsagent in Corn Street.

There were two news agents within easy walking distance of the bus stops – a big chain newsagent at the entrance to the shopping arcade that didn’t open until everybody had gone to work (I never did figure the logic behind that out), and a privately run one just round the corner.

As far as I could tell, the big difference between the two was everything except newspapers and chocolate bars. If you wanted to buy deodorant, toothpaste, stationary, both newsagents had them, but the big one had name brands. The other one had bootlegs of the same stuff. One morning in a bit of a panic I bought their cheap deodorant, and regretted it – it smelled of petrol, and burned the skin clean off your body.

The newsagent was run by a late thirties everyman called Gary. He had black hair, always look halfway smart, and seemed to always be on the receiving end of sarcasm from his “shop girl”. He wasn’t her Dad, but their working relationship certainly boredered on father daughter.

I never did find out her name. She was lovely. Probably only 18, and no doubt wiser in the ways of the world than me. She had brown bobbed hair, twinkling green eyes and a pinnafore that concealed any clue to the rest of her charms. I decided she was probably a good reason to buy a newspaper on a morning.

Of course the only problem with having an alterior motive for going in the newspaper shop on account of the girl behind the counter is that you suddenly become paranoid about your purchases. Do you really want to be seen buying “Personal Computer World” ?

I figured computer magazines were probably one up from porno mags, so bought them anyway – along with the hangover from my student days; FHM and Loaded.

Loaded was an out and out “lad mag” – filled with articles about the latest Z-list celeb, photoshoots with various young strumpets known only to the television adoring section of society, and news stories of drunken exploits, parties, and jokes you couldn’t tell your parents. FHM on the other hand had photoshoots of B-list celebs – the cast of baywatch and such like. Buying FHM was somehow more acceptible than Loaded.

In base terms, Loaded was to Hustler as FHM was to Playboy.

On this particular morning, I picked up a copy of The Independent, and plonked it down on the counter.

This was without doubt a “Watermelon moment”.

Any girl in the universe knows what I am talking about. For the rest of humanity, an explanation – in the 1980s movie “Dirty Dancing”, the character “Baby” played by Jennifer Grey is a young strumpet seeking the attentions of the focus of her infatuation – a dancer played by Patrick Swayze. Swayze’s main purpose throughout the movie seems to be (a) to take his top off as much as possibe, and (b) to gyrate against women while dancing.

Thrown into a scene where Baby enters the underground dance world inhabited in an impossibly unlikely manner by Swayze, her excuse for being there is “I carried a watermelon”.

These two basic ideas (no shirt, and crotch rubbing dance routine) seem to have created a mythology that has entered the gene pool. I’m sure girls are born these days with the phrase “I carried a watermelon” etched into their psyche.

If Captain Kirk had displayed a similar gratory dance routine while fighting aliens with his shirt off, the world could have ended up a very different place. Perhaps we won’t think about that for too long.

Where were we? Ah yes. Stood in front of shop girl.

“One pound please”

“Here you go”

Berk. Of all the impressive introductions I could have made, I chose “Here you go”.

While wandering up Church Green towards work, I played the scene through in my head. Arriving at the newspaper shop leaning from the top of a limmo like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Whoever bought a newspaper while leaning from the roof of a limmo?

Idiot.

A lady passed in the opposite direction towing some poor unfortunate rat of a dog on a lead. It was one of those little white fluffy dogs about the same size as a handbag, with a leg on each corner.

It occurred to me that if I took a run up and caught it just right, I could probably kick it quite a long way – get some real height on it.

Past the church, and out across the Leas, I started thinking about database stuff. The world of my newspaper shop muse was swapped for referential integrity and cascading updates.

I opened the office door and wandered through to my desk. It was 8:30, and not many people were in yet. After hanging my coat on the back of the chair and switching the computer on, I wandered off to wash my coffee mug up.

And there she was.

Sitting in the end office – the glass walled half conservatory – was the prettiest young blonde girl I had ever seen. Sam was sitting opposite, leaning back in his usual head cradling pose, talking and smiling.

Who was she? Was she new?

While making my coffee I peeked around the corner of the kitchen door, pretending to look around the office. Over Sam’s shoulder she looked at me.

Oh shit.

Then a cunning plan formed in my head. I’ll offer them a drink.

“Good morning! – can I get you two a hot drink?”

“We’ve already got one thanks Jon”

I closed the door and walked back down the office with my coffee, pretending to whistle, and pretending to be cool. As cool as you can be when you didn’t have a shave that morning, and your hair is sticking up a bit on one side. I nearly sat down at the wrong desk, but she wouldn’t have known that.

Over the next few minutes Darren and George arrived. As might be predicted, the new attraction was not missed by them either.

“Who’s that John?”

“Don’t know – they have been in there ever since I arrived”

“Marks out of two?”

“I’ll give her one!” said Darren in the manner a seven year old might while recounting the best joke ever that he had just heard in the playground.

George lifted one eyebrow in James Bond fashion and made an excuse to walk up the office. So did Darren. Funny that.

I heard “Hot drink Sam?” in the distance, and smiled.

A little later – while retreating from the underneath of my desk arse first, I got to meet the mystery girl.

Straightening up, with a pen between my teeth, and tucking my shirt in, I said a muffled “Hello!” and shook her hand.

Sian was apparently introducing her to everybody.

“This is Halley. She’s starting today, and will be helping me with paperwork, filing, typing…”

“And making us lovely coffee’s!”

“No, Darren. She will not.”

I smiled, and mouthed “take no notice” to her. She was probably only 17, and straight out of school. Now she was stood in front of me, there was nothing of her at all, but by crikey was she ever pretty.

I’m not quite sure how some girls do it, but her expertly messy short hair looked like a still had been taken of a movie on a windy day, and was now walking around on top of her head. She had huge blue eyes, and a huge colgate smile.

Later in the day I nearly caused Sian to wet herself.

While sorting out a computer for Halley, she was leaning out of my way, and slid half off her office chair. If anybody had walked in at that moment, they would have wondered what on earth was going on. Thankfully the company wasn’t big enough to have an H.R. person.

Halley’s legs were stuck between the chair and the desk, while she approximated a limbo act, leaning on the floor and in fits of giggles…

“I can’t get up!”

I stood up from my own precarious stretch to plug in a monitor cable, and took her by her wrist. Not having much experience of lifting model type girls from the floor, or having much clue about elegance and grace, I just lifted her back on the chair.

Setting her back down, Sian exploded in giggles, spitting her cup of tea across her keyboard.

“What?”

“Oh Jon”

“What?”

Halley was killing herself laughing now too.

“You just lifted her up like a rag doll!”

“She doesn’t weigh much”

“That’s not the point! Oh.. I’m going to wee myself”

George had seen it too.

“That was pretty funny, Jon”

I had no idea why they all though my lifting her back on her chair was so funny. I guess I had lifted her bodily into the air by her wrist, but I was kind of busy at the time. What was I supposed to have done? Swept her up in my arms?

I might know much, but I knew Halley was embarassed now – judging from her beetroot cheeks.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, fine”, she said, wiping a tear from her eye, still giggling.

I switched her computer on, and it started spurting text up onto the screen.

“Do you understand all this stuff then?”

“Yep”

“Blimey. It’s all gobbledegood to me”

“Me too, but don’t tell anybody”

“Really?”

It would be uncharitable to say that Halley was stupid, because she certainly wasn’t. She did reinforce many of the sterotypes about blondes though.

After getting her logged into Windows, and showing her how to write letters, save them and print them out, I wandered back to my desk.

I overheard Sian asking Halley if she knew the key to print in Wordstar a few minutes later.

While munching on my lunch a little later in the day, it struck me that I knew Halley better than Darren or George now. A certain smugness came over me. I also started worrying for her – she hadn’t met Mr Lions yet. He was at a doctors appointment and wouldn’t be in until after lunch.

No he wasn’t. I could hear him. He’d met her.

“Wehey! Hey! Look at this Sian! They’ve got me an assistant! You’re sat at the wrong desk love – here’s where you can sit… Anita – you’re moving desks to up here.”

“No I’m bloody not!”

“It’s alright young Halley – you let Mr Lions look after you”

Halley didn’t know what to say or do, and Sian – despite her better judgement – looked like she might wet herself again.

“Leave her alone Dick!”

Suddenly Mr Lions became the father of daughters I didn’t know he had, and my perception of him changed.

“It’s lovely to meet you Halley. My name is Dick Lions – like the big cats on the Serengetty plain. You do as my mate Sian says, and you won’t go far wrong.”

There was suddenly a warmth. The letcherous old git had turned into a favourite uncle at the flick of a switch. Here was the Mr Lions I would grow to like, and never forget.

Sam neatened the paperwork in his hands by dropping it through his fingers onto the desk.

“We want you to connect all the computers together, and make a database of all the customers, quotes, and orders so everybody can get at stuff quickly while they are on the phone”

He grinned.

“How does that sound?”

I wanted to say “Bloody impossible”. How best might I explain that the closest I had come to a network was the mysterious metal connectors on the back of the computers at college?

I knew the wires left t-shaped fittings, and dissappeared into plastic trunking around the perimeter of the room. Beyond that I had no clue. There could have been a room of telephony operators hidden somewhere in the college campus for all I know – beeping and screeching at each other in the same manner modems do.

A bizarre scene formed in my head of two telegraph receptionists sitting across from one another, both wearing thick glasses, and plaid skirts.

“eeeeeeee A”

“sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

“bong bong bong bong”

“eeee A”

Only those who remember the era of modems and sub 56K connections to the internet will remember the tones made by V32bis while handshaking. Some will have blanked it from their memory.

“Okay – I’ll get started with ordering the kit to connect the computers”

“Yep – while you’re at it, we could probably do with an audit of exactly what we have around the place”

Great. You wear new clothes to work, and within days of starting you find yourself scrabbling around on the floor under people’s desks.

While the voyeuristic side of the more adventurous mind would find a world of possibility in peering underneath desks, I can assure you that the reality is in fact very, very different from any fantasy. For one, any girl with even two brain cells devotes one and a half of them to keeping anything that shouldn’t be seen away from prying eyes. For two, you’re far more likely to find yourself knee deep in encrusted pizza debris under 20 stone “fat Alan’s” desk while he attempts to bend down to watch – which of course he cannot without firing several buttons across the office like bullets.

So. What do they have around the office besides my new screaming machine? I set off on my mini adventure.

“Hi Sian”

“Oh hi John – how can I help you?”

“I just need to take a look at your computer – find out what it is.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to connect all the computers together”

“Does that mean you’ll be able to see my screen?” (a look of horror spread across her face)

“No. It means they computers will form their own intelligence and run the company while we are all electrocuted and used as biological batteries”

(I didn’t really say that, but I might have thought it)

“No. It’s so you’ll be able to get quick access to what other people have done – and make your job easier”

“Oh. Okay then. I’ll go and make a cup of tea. Hang on – I need to save this Doc… oh bugger!”

Somehow Sian had hit close instead of save. Goodbye document.

“Can you get it back?”

“Did you save it?”

“No”

A few moments later there were angry banging-about noises in the kitchen.

She had a 386. Oh dear. Just a few years previously this would have been a very fine computer to have. Something to be proud of. Now it was akin to comparing a roller skate with a Ford Mustang (not a bad analogy – the average PC of 1995 was built not unlike a Ford Mustang – i.e. it weighed about the same as an ocean liner).

So – if Sian was going to run Windows for Workgroups, she would probably need a new computer.

On to George – man about town Will Carling lookalike. When I arrived at his desk, he was miraculously not on the phone. My arrival seemed to spark a show of manlyness between George and Darren – for both mine and Anita’s benefit no doubt.

“Got a girlfriend then Jon?”

“No…”

George grinned and rolled away from his desk, leaning back with his hands behind his head.

“Don’t blame you – nothing but trouble, women”

“You would say that, if Sharon caught you with that barmaid from the Three Pigs”

I worked out Sharon must be his wife – the stunning woman stood with arms around great looking kids in a photo on his desk.

“Oh christ – you should have seen her on Friday night. She kept bending over in front of me to get peanuts for people in the bar”

“You’d have a heart attack if she said anything to you”

“Who says she hasn’t ?”

“Yeah right”

You could see that Darren was now searching for some impressive annecdote from his inflated past to impress me with in turn – something to outdo George.

Mr Lions arrived on cue

“You young lads haven’t got a clue. When I was a test pilot in Bankcok, I would have been straight in there”

Anita had had enough.

“Oy! You lot. You’re embarassing Jon. Pack it in.”

George and Dave grinned at me. Anita continued;

“mind you, it’s the quiet one’s you’ve got to watch, isn’t it – I bet our new boy’s a right dirty so and so”

Mr Lions had heard enough too;

“That’s enough! Come on, get on with your work”

“Whoo hooOOP” (the closest in writing you can get to Anita’s submarine dive claxon laugh when anything vaguely naughty was suggested)

It turned out the rest of the office had half-passable computers – a mixture of 486SX and DX machines. Given the arrival of the Pentium, they were now yesterday’s news, but quite capable of running Windows.

Hand written list in hand, I went back to my desk and set about typing it up. Of course we didn’t have Microsoft Office, because – well – frankly this was before it became ubiquitous in offices across the land, and everybody had a favourite application for a particilar job.

Part of the reason everybody had a favourite application was of course because Windows of the 1995 era was spectacularly shite at running more than one application at the same time. One or two blue screen of death (BSOD) lockups per day was considered quite lucky.

The spreadsheet of choice in the office – installed on every computer – was SuperCalc 3. Apparently the height of DOS spreadsheet cleverness (which I was advised of by Sam, despite my knowledge to the contrary), Supercalc was the application on which the production side of the business was run.

Programming Supercalc could perhaps best be described in terms of having only two commands in a hypothetical programming language – “PRINT” and “GOTO”.

So what might I use to write up my audit? Microsoft Write. The predecessor of Wordpad. After a couple of minutes of typing at a speed that raised eyebrows around the office (their first experience of anybody that could type), I had my audit written up. One problem. I had no printer – and with no network in existence yet, not way to connect a printer short of wiring one to my computer.

So the next problem to solve was networking.

It turned out (after some furious book buying and reading) that the mysterious metal connectors at college were for “10-Base T” ethernet, using BNC connectors. They looked very similar to the coaxial cables used for cable television – because they were the same damn thing.

Looking through a trade catalogue containing all manner of rocket scientist toys and gadgets to do with networking that I had no idea about, I determined there were two ways we could go – “Cat 45″, or “BNC”. The first option was the future, but the network cards and cables cost a couple of pounds more than BNC. Sam told me to buy BNC.

Of course it’s only with hindsight that you slap your forehead and call yourself a complete f*cking idiot. It would be three years until we audited the network, and found the run between our network terminators was over twice as long as the advised limit. Another story for another time.

The order form for the various computer hardware read like a wordsearch puzzle. Of course no spelling checkers complained, because Microsoft Write didn’t have one.

My final task, and the one that would consume me for perhaps the next year – was the invention and development of a database to run the company. A system to end all systems – to perform everything the company needed to, and to empower staff, create efficiencies, and reduce paperwork.

The system would be built upon the recently released Microsoft Access 2. Microsoft SQL Server existed, but was priced firmly in the realm of the enterprise – not the 30 employee small business with a geek in charge of IT.

Microsoft Access was fine – very impressive even. The trouble with things that seem impressive is that you tend to try and use them far beyond their intended application. A good analogy would be trying to use a clockwork cine camera to record everything made by the BBC.

Little would I know on this first day that the database would eventually become known throughout the comany as “Damon” – after Damon Hill. Apparently because it was slow and and crashed a lot (which Damon did that year. A lot).