As crowds have been striked

When I was *teen years old, I sometimes helped my dad run his household equipment repair shop. Among many things we’ve been doing, once in a while there was a need to purchase replacement parts from a specialized store in the village nearby. So we would commute there by car, and pick up and pack necessary parts, and then wait for the invoice to be prepared and printed.

It was 1990s and the store had two desks equipped with desktop computers, and the invoicing process was pretty laborious. They used some sort of invoicing program running on (what I presume to have been) MS-DOS and it was operable with keyboard only. To prepare a complete invoice, the program required the operator to type the special code attached to each part (usually several letters and digits) and accept the choice by hitting ‘Enter’. Multiply that process by 30-40 parts and you get how fun that process was. Once the dot matrix printer started doing its noisy job, it meant the process was finally complete. All we had to do was to pay cash and say goodbye.

Over the years that setup was modernized, but very modestly. I assume it was tax law that drove innovation in this department. Shops and stores had to purchase legalized cash registers, calculate and collect value-added tax, and hand out fiscal receipts. I can’t even remember if they started using barcode readers at any point of time. The core was still as simple as it gets: codes attached to each product, some sort of invoicing program, and that noisy dot matrix printer.

Sadly, my dad closed the repair shop long before card payments or Apple Pay, so I can’t tell what that tiny cute part store uses these days. I’m not even sure if their invoicing process is still as labor intensive as it used to be given what I know about the current state of household equipment and its repairability.

But all of that was in 1990s up to early 2000s. Nowadays, all those memories feel like a distant dream to me.

Last week I woke up in 2024…

…and 2024 is another year when every single computer I see around me, whether mine or someone else’s, can be assumed to be always online (or be capable of going online any time). And vast majority of corporate computers that process any chunk of information about my life uses the same set of tools, produced and sold by the same bunch of companies.

And in 2024, on July 19 to be precise, it was possible for one error in some third-party application to disrupt operations of numerous banks, airlines, TV stations and whatnot. Just one error that hit less than 1% of Windows computers worldwide, yet it single-handedly brought a huge chunk of our modern electronic always-online never-sleeping economy to a temporary halt.

I don’t know what I’m doing in this article. Maybe I’m just craving simpler times and accidentally being too loud about it.