Before the Piper switchover, Google’s Perforce instance was running on one of the most expensive PCs ever built, with over $1m of DRAM. Its centralized design was not a setup one would want to copy.
Yes but that was 15 years ago and do you really think the lifetime cost of building and running a custom VCS will be less than $1m, all in?
Also IIRC from the original 2011 Perforce admins paper before Piper, they said they had seriously overspecced the RAM and could use a lot less. There's an annotated copy here: https://www.anantjain.xyz/posts/perforce
The most striking thing to me about IBM memos from this era is just how literate executives were. These days most VPs struggle to write a single sentence worth reading.
They also had secretaries (even more-so at the executive level) who would proof-read the letter and return it to the boss for their revision and/or signature. Contrast that with today where it's easy for someone to click send and off it goes, incomplete thoughts and grammar errors and all.
If you want to improve your communications - when you finish writing your email, leave it as a draft for 30-40 minutes. Then go back an re-read it with a fresh viewpoint.
If I can suggest - the USAF has a manual for this, which guides you in being clear, concise, and specific:
I worked for a government entity and was involved in a lawsuit based on a very old, not-IBM mainframe contract that was solicited before I was born and amended like 30 times.
The memos and letters in those files were both amazing and depressing, as when you fast forwarded from the late 70s to circa 2010, the writing quality steadily declined.
Related? I have several sets of old encyclopedias, Collier's from the 40's and World books from the 60's and 80's. It is very noticeable how much better the older articles are written.
And weird errata, while looking for an example the Wikipedia article on Collier's claims they started in 1949 while my copies have copyrights 1932 - 1944 so were probably printed 1944/45.
Many people from that era were well read and well spoken. He in particular sounded like he had some interesting life experiences: air force pilot, ambassador to the Soviet Union, president of the Boy Scouts, etc.
I was wondering whether it was still in use, and if so for how much longer. Apparently it is no longer operational but, hearteningly, has been historically preserved and is now let out as a period filming location.
Double dash has long been the way to clearly indicate in plain ASCII text an em dash as distinct from a simple hyphen. So I think the author here is here emphatically reclaiming the use of the em dash while pointedly not using the Unicode character so beloved by LLMs.
Years back I was an intern in a bio lab whose ultracentrifuge achieved spin rates similar to a turbopump. On its titanium head was a bar code used to regulate the speed via a beam of light. Unfortunately the manufacturer issued some with the wrong bar code, causing them to overspin and, at one lab, undergo "rapid unexpected disassembly", sending chunks of flying titanium through concrete walls. Fortunately it was at night and no-one was hurt, but the salespeople travelled out to every customer site the next day to implement the product recall.
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