I'm still a bit jet lagged from my recent trip to Germany, so over the last couple of days I got up earlier than usual. Today it was at 5am. I actually don't mind, as this gives me some time to catch up with things.
When I went to my office a couple of minutes ago, I quickly noticed that my DSL was down. I call my provider's support line, which I am on hold for the "next available analyst" at the moment. The plan is simple, I'll ask the support person to throw away the script and reset my DSL port as politely as possible. I've been here before. It seems to me that any connectivity problem results in a port reset anyway, so why not start here. Anyway, that's a topic for another blog.
While on hold, the system announced that the provider experiences network problems in my area. So, I guess I am stuck without Internet access for a bit. I'll keep holding to ask for an ETF (Estimated Time to Fix). In the meantime, while still on hold music, my mind started to wonder. I started my professional career before everybody was connected. What in the world did we do with our computers before we had the Internet and the World Wide Web ?
Hmm, I remember finding computers to very useful for the support job I was doing at the time. We used an Oracle-based support management system at the time. Calls came in via phone or fax. I had several dedicated X25 lines, allowing me to telnet into my customers' servers to diagnose issues. Some of my customer were security sensitive agencies. The only way to communicate was via faxes, as they needed to be able to keep a trail of all communications.
Our knowledge database was a home-grown, file-based system. It used grep(1) to find articles, and it was able to extract fax numbers for customers from our support database, and then fax support articles to customers. We regularly created CDs with all the patches and articles to send to our supported customers. As a support engineer, I was goaled to create new articles. Over time, our support team created quite a comprehensive knowledge base. I recall that we could resolve up to 95% of all support calls with the data we had in our knowledge base.
I also remember the beginning of Email, and reading Email via mail(1). Most, if not all, Email was internal to our company. SPAM was not invented yet. 10 Emails a day was considered a heavy Email load.
Later in the job, more and more customer got X25 connectivity. We used these connections mainly for UUCP-based Email, and to FTP updates to our knowledge base to our customers , and to exchange Unix core dumps and other diagnostic logs. It did not really change the way the support department operated.
Then, and I vividly remember this part, somebody talked about the new thing called the World Wide Web. I was sent a tool called "Lynx", which was referred to as "WWW viewer" by my colleagues (Note: most of us where using Wyse terminals at the time). We installed Lynx on our server, and started to play. It was pretty useless. There were a couple of WWW sites, mostly research stuff. Granted, it was great to link content together, but finding pages with valuable content for my work was a non starter. After we played around for a bit, we decided that this WWW thing is never going to take off. We must have felt the same way as one of the first telephone users.
After a brief period, somebody came up with the idea of making our support knowledge base available over the WWW. We could reduce the number of CDs we had to manufacture and send out to our customer, and we could link articles together. We pinged our customers to see if this approach would fly. Most of them were positive, but insisted to still get the maintenance CDs on a regular basis. We went ahead and uploaded our knowledge base to the WWW. Over time, fewer and fewer customer wanted the maintenance CDs. If memory serves me right, I think it was my government agency that was the last customer to request our support CDs, as they were not allowed public Internet access.
Fast forwarding to today, I can't think on anything I do that is not based upon some kind of Internet service. Taking my DSL line out for a couple of hours is a painful reminder of that. I guess "The Network is the computer" also means that without network your computer is no great use.