History of first use of allcomputerized typesetting 3298
The *n*x world has built empires on top of diff. Almost all source control depend on diff-style listings to step up (and down) between versions.
On a different track, I have asked senior judges about what they do for source control and auditing. They get very quiet when I do this.
Part of our paper source library was the filcoms. That was another thing that got dropped in the process at the end. There...
In our situation we had everything in network management systems, so feeding output to the bean counters was easy. Besides, it was audited in real time; including serial numbers; so it was pretty close to reality.
25k?... Yerroow!. Old friend of mine died about 8 years ago, lived like a hermit, left loads of dosh. The Lawyers divided up the dosh...
We eventually got tired of them, and made a cron job to send a full report every month (20k items, remember) with a diff from last months; plus daily diff listings; mbuttaged to be easily imported into their database-spreadsheet-whatever.
They were constantly using spreadsheets that could go away for recalculation and swapping for 10 minutes or more.
They were meant to track the model-serial numbers of stuff, and make adjustments to the accountancy of capital; but they were unable to keep up with the churn rate of replacements.
We moved around ~20% of the stuff during a year, and replaced a third of that; much on hardware failures.
We build stuff that is not doable by hand anymore. We went over that threshold sometime in the late 1980s.
"By hand" nows means using a spreadsheet or grep-sed-awk-emacs.
-- mrr
History of first use of allcomputerized typesetting 3299
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