We technological wizards that we are have basically learned a great deal from our mistakes. One has only to read the book, “The Soul of a New Machine” to learn just how much technology was based on this premise. As is often the case, there are those of us who refuse even the most basic premise. You know the one that says if you have something on electronic media, the chances of it going south are inversely proportional to the number of backup copies you have. If you have one copy, then your chances of losing that data are 50% less, so on and so forth. Let me relate to you how I learned my lesson.

Back in my early career, I and my team were working on one of the first PC based teller systems for Citicorp. This system is written in what I now refer to as God’s language – Assembler. None of those easy statements of A+B=C. No you had to define specific storage areas in memory by their hexadecimal address. Move that 8 bit data into a register of the processor, compare it to the other address located in another register and then check the flags register if it did what you wanted, in this case add, correctly and then store it in another hex addressable memory location. So to accomplish that one statement you might have 15 to 20 lines of code.

So here we are all happily working along when suddenly about midmorning, the power is turned off. Now it’s a completely sunny day outside. These “computers”, you also have to keep in mind, had about 45% of the space taken up in the case by the power supply. So these babies would ride out some pretty crappy power. But it just went off and instantly 90 minutes of hard fought, tested and debugged code when with it. As the head geek, I went off to find the reason why.

Well, much to my surprise I found an electrician who was working in another suite of offices who had taken it upon himself to just switch off the electric. I was not happy, so I marched into the office manager’s office and asked her very politely to find said electrician and explain to him the error of his way. She later returned and said that she had a very nice conversation with the man and that in no way would he ever do such a thing again without talking to her first. Thus reassured, I sulked off to our “area” and informed my mates that everything was good and we got back to work.

Within an hour later, all the power magically disappeared from the office once again. This time 45 minutes of work was literally gone. The office manager met me at the door to the office as I was leaving to go personally find the electrician. She being the one more politically astute instructed me that it was in my best interest to let her deal with the situation. I reluctantly relented, but I really wanted some revenge.

That lesson taught me two important things early in my career. The first being, that you if you can mentally freeze your thought processes at that precise moment without any interruptions and don’t move, don’t’ talk; just wait patiently for the power and the equipment to return to normal. If it does so within a few minutes and if you start right away, you can recreate a surprisingly large amount of work from memory. There are alot of “if’s” in that last sentence.

The second thing I learned was my new battle cry. Even today you will hear me utter it in the office at the approach of any thunderstorm or other cataclysmic event, either to myself or anyone around me within hearing range.

“Save early and often”. I have to say that the second lesson works much better than the first.

RHB - Sage of the Present, Oracle of the Future.