How has the Interned Influenced Me?
A little bit of the Old Times
That’s an interesting question, since I’m old, and I’ve lived in a
world not just without Internet, but without personal computers!
Well, I´ve lived in a world without computers, period! J
My first contact with computers was around 1972. I worked in the accounting department of a large
chain of stores in Brazil, and we in the Pelotas (a city near the State´s
capital) branch received some reports – inventory position, sales summaries,
etc. – from the headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.
“These reports were printed by a computer, ooooh!” But I had
never seen a computer – neither none of my colleagues, I think.
Then
in 1975 a new company was established in Pelotas (check the map below, or at
Google - https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pelotas+-+RS,+Brazil/@-5.6312841,-102.7326842,3z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x95104991ad796447:0x99bab4aec1bd644f
), and it brought an “electronic brain” to the city! And since accounting machines were the stuff most
similar to computers in town, I have been hired. I was 19, with no formal training in
computing, none at all. I attended an
in-house COBOL programming course and became an intern programmer.
It was an IBM/370, running DOS/VS, and we used mostly COBOL, despite the
“Chief of Programming” (yes, we didn´t have fancy names like “Software
Development Manager” at that time! J
) being an Assembler programmer. It was
all about batch processing and since this we programmers worked at desks,
coding our programs in paper forms, then punching it in cards, and then sending
the card decks to the “computer room” to compile our program and catalog it in
a library, in disk.
The
images below are pretty similar to the computer room at this company:
After our programs were ready (compiled, link-edited, tested,
catalogued in an “executable library” in disk) we send to the Computer Operator
a flowchart describing how to execute it in production – how many and which magnetic
tapes should be read and/or recorded (there was a tape-library, they were
identified by numbers), what disc unitis should be used (yes, the hard discs were removable!) if it would need use the printer, etc.
The Computer Operator was like a priest of the sacred ritual of “executing
batch processing”! And the holy precincts of the computer was - taboo! - forbidden ground to the ordinary mortal! :-)
And that way we processed the City Hall Real Estate Taxes Control
System, the City Hall Payroll, and others.
My favorite was the Banking System, for the Rio Grande do Sul State´s
Bank. There was no ATMs, no bar codes in
the checks, no computer workstations for the tellers… How things did work?
Every morning, we (we the Processing Data Center, the sacred priests of
the mysteries of the Computer J
) sent to each bank agency a set of books, listing the balance of each and
every account belonging to the agency.
Each time a customer reached a teller to exchange a check for cash, the
teller would query the book, check if the account balance was enough and if so
they´d give the customer his cash and handwrite in the book, aside the balance
value – “minus BRL 100”, for example. That way the teller kind of "temporarily updated" the balance.
At the end of the day,all checks (and other related documents) were sent
to the Processing Data Center. And we typed the data of each check! In a matter of four or five hours, a team of
five or six people typed the data of six or eight thousand checks! Around midnight, the data started to be
processed, computing the new balances.
And around 04 PM a car fleet departed to deliver the new books with the
updated data.
I´m kind of simplifying the things.
There was also Quality Control processes called “Data Preparation” and “Consistence
Checking”, with whole departments assigned to.
And, of course, there was the implementation of new bank agencies, when we had to type all data – name, address, etc. – of all customers and their balance values in a weekend. If we did not
finish in an weekend, when the bank was closed, we´d have to “abort the mission”
and try again the next weekend! In one
of these “hellish-weekends”, I and a couple of colleagues went to a bank to get
more documents to transcribe. We got a
taxi for it. When the taxi driver saw us
getting out of the bank, at 03 AM, carrying some big metal boxes, he get out of
the car, and with a weak trembling voice, asked “Please, take the car, but let
me go away”! J
These were the old, “epic” times of data processing, and we old timers
have lots of stories about sleepless nights to share! J
A Radical Change – Skype, VPNs,
Shared Documents, Remote Desktops
Shifting to the present times:
from the beginning of 2012 until the end of 2013 I worked for an
American company. Except for a 2 weeks
starting period in the headquarters (Roanoke, Virginia), I worked from home.
My daily routine was to get up around 7 AM, walk the dogs, calmly have
my breakfast, and at 9 AM turn on my computer and connect to the company´s
Virtual Private Network (VPN).
In one work day I could have some scrum meetings thru Skype, follow and
update the progress of projects I was working on thru Sharepoint-supported
documents… Notice that the team members
chatting thru Skype could be in several Brazilian States and also in the United
States, Europe, Asia… And that the
Sharepoint server was in United States.
One typical activity was access our customer´s computers to do software
development and/or to administer system resources. I´ve worked for companies inside Brazil, but
at some 1500 km from my home-office, without leaving my living room! And I have worked the same way for companies
in United States!
The customers do receive the solution they need, as if I had been
there.
My employers save the money and time I would spend travelling.
And I, instead of having to travel, could work at home, without having
to spend time going to office every day, sometimes being able to pick my teenage daughter
at school, sometimes preparing the family´s lunch, as a caress to welcome them… Not to mention the extremely cold, or
extremely hot, or rainy days, when
instead of facing the unpleasant whether I could just sit at my desk at home,
wearing comfortable staying-home clothes!
Was it like vacations? No, it
wasn´t!
The commitment to deliver increases, when you´re working from
home. The only thing your manager sees
is what you deliver, nobody cares about the effort you did but didn´t solve the problem!
You need to create your own daily work routine – and be extremely disciplined
following it! You need to manage
yourself.
You need teach your family also, make them understand that at business
hours you are at home, but you are not available. You are at work!
And you need to teach yourself when it´s time to stop working and be at
home with your family again. The same
way you must be alert to not lose the focus in your work at business hours, you
need also learn not forget to stop working when it´s time!
There will still be extra work hours, of course. But I can tell that is a lot better a
sleepless night at my home-office, being able to grab a coffee and a snack
whenever I want, being in the same house than my family, than to spend a night
at the office, dinning cold pizza in an empty building!
I now own a small software development company in Brazil – PPAI Sistemas
de Informação Ltda (www.ppai.com.br). As soon as I finish my time at KSU, I expect
to be able to do business with companies spread across all the Brazilian
territory and abroad also.
And, last but not least – thanks to the Internet, I will be able to be
paid remotely!
And Shifting from Work to
Personal Life…
E-mails
I had a sister, who passed the way last year. She lived in Denmark. The first years she lived there, we almost
lost all contact. But then… the e-mail appeared! And it was like a good fairy spell, we could
talk with each other again, share with each other again - in a matter of minutes, no more 20 or 30
days waiting for the snail-mail! The conversations
we had by e-mail meant a lot, made a lot of difference in my capability to
accept her death!
Without Skype and Facebook I
probably Would not be at KSU!
And without Skype I probably would not be at KSU! I wouldn´t be able to be so far away from my
daughter if I was not able to talk with her daily, listen to her voice, see her
lovely face…
Thru Skype and Facebook I can be aware of her daily life, chat with her, share my pictures and see hers… It´s not like sitting side by side at home, but it´s a lot better
than letters or phone calls!
I´m even able to “be the daddy” remotely! J Like advising how to manage school issues, to
what vet the dogs should be taken – and, as daddies always do, sending the money to pay the vet!
So, thanks to Skype, Facebook and Internet Banking, I´m at KSU and at
the same time I´m not completely away from Brazil!
Miscelaneous Listening to Music, Reading, Studying…
I think I already wrote a lot. So
I´ll just mention that everything about books, discs, encyclopedias and text
books, changed radically. We listen the
music we want whenever we want, we read (almost) every book for free or at a
low cost, and, at my home, “Lets check at Google” is a mantra at study time!
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