Be Excellent To Each Other

"It looks like you might be dropping some packets."

"Ever since you terminated that fat pipe."

I got an A level in Computing, which in 1994 was all about binary and so on. Can't remember a thing about it, which may be wy I work with mentals and that these days.

"Is that a token in your ring network, or are you just pleased to see me?"

Proper mentals? Sounds really exhausting. And difficult.

BTW, for the nerdy amongst us, there's The GUI Gallery for, err, old GUIs. Not really exhaustive though, and there might be better websites like it.

"My, you're getting a lot of gopher traffic in there."

GEM Paint. I've still got the floppies (my 1512 died years ago). Never used it though, because I followed the instructions that came with it and ended up wiping the boot disk.

I don't work in IT but I have some IT qualifications. Only basic ones though. NVQ stuff.

OK, that'll do, we have a winner Yet sadly, there will be people with valid "ICT" qualifications reading this very board who won't have got that. Scary isn't it?

Nerd +1010010010110001100111001

There's going to be a lot of people with DEGREES who won't get that!

I dunno, gopher's pretty goddamn obsolete; I'm not sure I'd think less of someone for not having heard of it. I have, but then I've also handled magnetic core memory, examined a X/25 board taken from a PDP/11, and regularly use (through work) Viewdata, which is still the primary selling channel for travel agents in the UK and, horiffically, is actually Presetel i.e. two-way Teletext. This may be a good candidate for World's Most Obviously Hideously Outdated Technology Still In Comercial Use For No Real Good Goddamned Reason. I can understand, say, ancient factory control systems running on DEC minicomputers or whatnot on the "ain't-broke-not-messing-with-it" basis but in terms of two-way client-server rich information presentation systems we have this new thing called the World Wide Web now and it is going to be just awesome.

Hmm. That went a bit ranty there, didn't it?

Oh, neither would I, I just meant scary in that you suddenly realise you're OLD when you realise a once familiar thing has been completely obsoleted and not mentioned at all anywhere for a good 10 years.



Haha, prestel? My first modem was a scavenged prestel modem, 1200/75 baud, connected to a BBC B. Let's just say I didn't upload much to BBSs.

I love completely obsolete tech that people are inexplicably still using.

Seriously, this is on a par with the people here discussing the differences between US ketchup and UK ketchup here, right now.

I've always wondered what that horrific text monstrosity that travel agents use is. It must takes ages before you can actually work out whats going on with it.

It is either Viewdata or Travelcat, which amusingly is one of our products (First Choice desktops all run Travelcat, for instance). Travelcat is run in a VT420 session into a VMS or Solaris host and is written (no fooling) in Dibol, a proprietary Cobol flavour. It's old enough that all these things were actually a good idea when it was written. It also has an awful lot of extremely capable backoffice financial things that somewhat offset the terrible user interface.

Ranty joking aside, the major problem with replacing these systems is muscle memory and familiarity. Most experienced agents can literally tear through them, hammering the data entry in much much quicker than anyone has ever managed a web-based system to offer. Admittedly training new staff is a problem and it tends to make the staff less interchangable cogs and more skilled professionals, so the companies are generally less keen on it than the agents. You'll not see this sort of product used in call centes, which probably tells you something about the level of product knowledge you are going to get in store compared to on the phone. Put it this way, I'd pretty much always book package holidays in a shop, after three years working on ecommerce travel websites.

This gives rise to amusing hybrids like Viewdata Plus, which is the standard Viewdata screen (which typically presents three hotels on a page) with a little web page alongside it on the screen with pics etc of the three hotels so they can show the customer what it looks like. I'm informed that keeping the two things synced was a bastard to write.

The only IT 'quals' I have is/are CLAIT. At the moment I rub oil onto naked bodies for a living, hoping to change that very soon though!

Ironically, I never completed my degree, scraped through colleges, have only 2 non-shit GCSEs yet know what gopher is. Which proves something about something.

Malicious Afterthought, you have the geekiest job of all of us.

Fuck you buddy
\

So that's what Perkoise looks like....

That's going back a bit. Was fascinated reading about comms, as it was called then, in computer magazines. Didn't get my first taste of it until my dad borrowed a 9.6 modem from work, and connected it to my trusty Amiga 1200 (with whopping 80Mb hard disc).

Interesting that, as I suspected, the travel agents software is a prestel variant.

Even today, for a lot of package holidays sold off a modern ecommerce website like ThomasCook.com, an awful lot of the operators take their bookings through backend systems consisting of automated screen scraping scripts that talk to the Viewdata hosts. So when you click "book", we package that data up and hand it off to a software layer we maintain that goes onto Viewdata (which is just Prestel, still, albeit over IP now) and literally spits out keypresses and parses the incoming screens with regexps and column matches and suchlike to place the actual booking. This leads to very interesting bugs sometimes, like when the price field only had four characters in so a £11,199 luxury cruise for four could be booked for £1199. Good, eh?

God, I hate screen-scrapes. I work for A Big Insurance/Pensions/Investments Company, and various aggregators use screen-scrapes to acquire quotes from our e-commerce products (quite often ignoring the XML solutions we provide, but we bend over forwards to please them anyway).

All it takes is one tiny cosmetic change on a landing page (which, as it's cosmetic, hasn't gone through change control) and the tab order has been subtly altered, naffing up the screen scrape for god knows how many aggregators and losing tonnes of business.

In conclusion:

I spent a year writing apps that screen-scraped and screen-dropped onto CICS sessions for BT. Nightmare stuff.

God that's a beatiful vision of the future. (as predicted in the late 70s)

We do this. Scraping Viewdata is pretty easy, actually, as it hardly ever changes and has almost no presentation code anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine. But we also scrape the low cost airlines' websites so we can offer their stock through our systems (none of them, yet, have given us an XML interface, though they are starting to move in that direction) and it's bloody hard work.