Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.
But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.
From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
Indeed, we still pay homage to the era with terms such as the stack, pushing and popping, and all kinds of things .. i remember we had fun inserting random infinite loops in other students cards on occasion until we all realized we could just have marked “finished” stacks with an X across the spine, and also to ease sorting, and so on .. i would mark certain sub-routines with different color markers on the spine too, just to see a budget for how much computing time i expected to be billed for, and so on and on .. lots of valuable hands on came from the card-based computing, its a lost art ..
My firt job out of college in the early 1990s was at an equipment manufacturer who was still using them. They had a big chart on the wall titled "punch-card elimination" and a line trending down, but it wasn't at zero yet.
My work there was all new code and didn't involve any of that, however.
I found that adding "philosophy" descriptions help guide the tooling. No specs, just general vibes what's the point, because we can't make everyone happy and it's not a goal of a good tool (I believe).
Technology, implementation may change, but general point of "why!?" stays.
To be fair, being from a small country can help too. (Hi from Lithuania.) It helps with marketing, because while it's difficult being Worlds Amazon, it's easier and more marketable to be lithuanian version.
Yes, it has downsides too, as economy and people resources work depending on scale - smaller community is going to be smaller - but it's a way to startup and build a base solution, while thinking of something else that may change the rest of the world later.
Of course, yeah, in the end it's just different...
P.S. I'm in same boat technology wise. It's difficult to learn everything, and learn it "on time" :)
Is there a list of these "goverment" sites anywhere?
I have been working on similar project, focusing on lithuanian-only "goverment" sites, but it's not perfectly obvious how to recognise public vs private websites, as at least half of those are managed privatelly, used publically. (Mostly due that was cheaper and/or because lack of requirements and/or other weird situations.)
But yeah, I can confirm that stats are same-ish in Lithuanian web too. I just havent finished gathering data yet, it will take a while.
What we have is published on https://securitybaseline.eu/datasets openly. Some governments publish lists, and they will be incomplete. In the article we point to our most successful approach: sifting through the (partial) zone file with domain owner information. That delivered thousands of sites the Dutch government didn't even know about.
Perhaps a freedom of information request might also work, but that will take a lot of time to write correctly and does not scale across all governments.
I personally am not sure what's the point of this, when the graph seems like doesn't give any real information + doesn't even work on mobile (no hover), but congrats on finishing up the series!
Dunno, I have been in IKEA and saw 50 types of drawer handles, for example :)
(Same for car interior design, or things like even doors that some swivels on one axis, some split on multiple, some slide.)
I don't think that us humans really actually like/want standarts. We think we do, but there are 100+1+1 standart from which to choose. So Claude becoming "standart" iš just +1 standart to choose from. Unique is fun!
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