I have an almost name sake and you’re reading this blog via his baby. When we’re old men, I suspect our lives will be pretty different. I’ll be the bloke in the park, feeding the ducks and waving his walking stick as the kids roar past on their hover boards shouting….
‘I fought in the browser wars so you could ride those damn things’
…whilst my almost-namesake will probably be enjoying his retirement by traversing the globe in his luxury Enourmoyacht. Having invented the damn hover board no doubt.
Back in the heady days of the late 90’s, I was working for an internet technology ‘incubator’ unit based at my local university. I’d spend the previous few years working for one of the biggest computing companies on the planet and now going to work in jeans on a university campus was a welcome change. My colleague and I had persuaded our new boss to introduce an unofficial 20% rule – inspired by a similar system at 3M – so we could develop our own ideas on top of the work that the unit was supposed to be doing.
A few months into the job, I called my colleague into my little office to show him something that I’d hacked together over a few weeks of my 20% time. I’d been trying to keep a little diary and was getting bored mashing this manually into HTML, so I’d built a rudimentary GUI, which allowed me to write entries in text and then saved it to a database and served it out properly rendered.
There was no inline linking or styling (you could add links into a ‘related links’ section separately, which when served appeared alongside in the page). It was therefore pretty basic stuff.
‘What is it ?’ asked my colleague.
‘It’s a Web Diary system. You can type in your diary entry and then publish it to the web’ I replied.
‘Who the hell wants to publish a diary ?’
‘Erm…. not sure. I’m sure someone will’.
That was the last we heard from that project.
A year or two later, I had started to develop small-scale systems which we would now recognise as ‘Web Content Management’, mainly at that stage for intranet and extranets. The incubator unit had been disbanded and I’d been taken on by a small consultancy company, to further develop these systems and add additional functionality for the increasing number of customers.
I remembered the diary code, blew the dust off it and integrated it into the pre-release version of the new intranet software. The idea was that the staff could maintain their own pages within the organisational structure about themselves. I’d added the ability to upload pictures, extended the authoring a bit to allow inline linking so they could add links to each others pages etc… it looked half-decent.
‘Explain it to me’ said the new boss.
‘Well, it’s sort of a way for staff to share their interests with colleagues’
‘Why would they want to do that ?’
‘I s’pose so they can find other people in the company who like the same things as they do….’
‘Nobody is going to do that’.
Again, that was the end of that idea.
Between these two events – before the end of the unit – my colleague and I had invented an addictive new game.
We’d been sent a small plastic football from one of our customers and we used to spend our lunch hours in the server room, trying to chip it into a waste paper basket (or as we say here, ‘bin’). So addictive was this game, that we’d get to work early and leave late just to try and perfect the techniques required to win at what we’d now dubbed ‘BinBall’.
An unfortunate incident involving one of us knocking out one of the DNS servers for over an hour with a misdirected shot led to it voluntarily being banned, which was a shame as we’d only just finished the 15 page ‘Official Guide to BinBall – Authorised by the National BinBall Association’.
And we’d been too slow to get the ‘nba.com‘ domain.
Matt Mullen is an Industry Consultant at Nstein Technologies [http://www.nstein.com]. He also now accepts that servers rooms are no place to develop dangerous ballgames.
