Years ago, I had just finished giving a presentation to Interocean Steamship Corporation in San Francisco.
They were in the California Building, and after the meeting I rode down from their tenth-floor office with the company president, a tall Swedish fellow.
He told me they were accepting my proposal.
That was the beginning of a great three-year relationship. I developed major systems for them, first on an IBM System/3 Model 10 and later on a Model 15.
But as we rode down in that elevator, after accepting my proposal, the president looked at me and said:
“There are two P’s in the word shipping.”
So much for the brilliant computer consultant.
Apparently I could design a major business system, but I couldn’t spell the business I was designing it for.
A couple of years later, near the end of our second contract, Interocean hired a woman to run the system.
Not long afterward, she called me in tears.
There had been an accident at the IBM data center.
The entire source-code base was gone.
The system was down, and the company was in serious trouble.
Back then there was no GitHub. No cloud backup. No automatic restore button.
And technically, I had done something I probably wasn’t supposed to do.
I had kept a copy of the source code.
Not on disk.
On paper.
A very large pile of computer printout.
At the time I was training two beautiful young women in my trade, so I grabbed that mountain of source code, grabbed my two trainees, and we headed over to Interocean right before Christmas.
The place was miserable.
Everybody thought they might be finished.
But my two trainees immediately took over.
They organized the staff into typing positions, divided up the printed source code, and turned the office into a human data-recovery center.
Line by line, page by page, they recreated the system from that pile of paper.
And it worked.
The system came back.
The company survived.
Some time later, I stopped by to see how everyone was doing.
There was a cute young blonde woman there whom I had flirted with many times over the years.
She had always politely declined my attention.
This time she came straight out of the crowd, walked up to me, and kissed me fully on the lips in front of everyone.
For one brief moment, I wasn’t just the programmer.
I was the guy who had saved the company.
And somewhere in all of this is another lesson from the early days of computing:
Always keep a backup.
Even if the backup is a giant pile of paper.
And always remember—
There are two P’s in shipping.
This shared post is read-only. Sign in as owner to comment.