Memory lane. We’ve come a long way, baby.
I’ve just come out of a couple of meetings and am about to have lunch. I left for work at around 9.15am, completed some prep, reviewed progress on a major project and entered the meeting at 9.28am. My journey involved bare feet, two doorways, turning on my video setup and sitting down.
During the first meeting, which was a daily ‘touch base’ event, my colleagues and I discussed progress on the project while sharing a document, mapping progress and updating elements as necessary. We also discussed updates to a business document, sharing the text so all could approve it. A couple of other little bits of business and we were done.
Just prior to 10am we left that meeting and some of us joined another. This was a twice weekly progress meeting with a client to cover progress on a large project, demonstrate new functions added since the last meeting, answer questions and flag upcoming milestones. Live screens from the project were shared with all participants and a couple of bugs demonstrated.
The participants in the first meeting were at three different locations across Queensland, the fourth in Melbourne. The participants in the second meeting were again spread across Queensland with most of the client representatives located in a regional city two hours from Sydney with one in Sydney.
Each meeting used a different video conferencing option, the first our regular system, the second the client’s, both robust, that enabled us all to clearly see and hear each other and to share our screens to demonstrate various elements we were working on locally. We could interactively edit a document being shared between us and see changes being made in real time. All of this happened smoothly without technical glitches.
So, no big deal in any of this. Pretty much business as usual in 2022.
Now, step back about 25 years when the writer of this piece started working in Higher Education.
The Internet wasn’t ubiquitous and many families were not connected - indeed many families did not have a computer
The university I went to work at did not have a consolidated, comprehensive website (I went there to establish one)
The IT department was running a web server and all staff and students were provisioned with a web publishing space – staff spaces open to the world, student spaces locked down to internal network - spaces were not monitored
More adventurous academics put learning resources in their web spaces but had to put a lot of their teaching effort into showing students how to download the resources (Web 2.0 with its bi-directional data transfers was still years away)
All systems were hosted inhouse – on Sun Solaris hardware at around $25K per server and similar for a Sun RAID set attached to each server
The university network ran on Novell Netware with GroupWise as the email client
There was no institution-wide Learning Management System in place (and just an experiment in the IT School using, if I recall correctly, IBM Learnspace)
Video conferencing was based on proprietary hardware that was expensive, required dedicated comms pathways (such as Telstra landlines), was unreliable and very limited in connectivity
As for ePortfolios, lecture recording and so on, dream on!
The iPhone and iPad were a least a decade away
Classroom AV was largely OHPs (OverHead Projectors)
Macintosh computers for staff were not supplied or supported (with rare exceptions - think Design faculty!!)
I could go on… we’ll all have our recollections!
With the adoption of the WWW as the universal connector, the emergence of Web 2.0 and the transition of so many major systems to use web-based front ends, access opened up. In a tweak of the old Java promise, ‘write once, deploy many’ the web promised (and delivered) ‘write one good web front end, be open to most comers’.
Not infrequently these days as I paddle around in the Ducks’ development milieu I reflect on the extraordinary changes that have occurred over the last couple of decades. The contemporary tools and methodologies that Shane and Wiley and our contractors use are so far removed from what was available even just a few years ago it’s staggering.
Cloud based services are probably the biggest transition. AWS, Bitbucket code management, frequent code merging during development to facilitate testing and build client confidence are some benefits of this new world. Things like the potential to scale server capacity up and down through AWS, depending on demand, combined with the world class reliability and security of hosted services enables a small company such as All the Ducks to focus their cognitive capital on the applications being developed. This is a tremendous spinoff for productivity.
Finally, as one whose role does not involve development but is more oriented to overarching project monitoring and liaising with clients around the delivery of a real world solution, the new environments described at the start of this piece are wonderful. No descriptions of functionality or look and feel can be as effective as showing on screen in real time, or better still, having the client able to click and poke as the solution moves toward fruition. This can build client confidence and reassurance.
So let’s go for the occasional stroll down memory lane, mainly to encourage us to appreciate what we have now. Not sure many of us would want to linger there, though.
Happy memories!