“[Hack on] it and They will come”
From a great Apple story:
Once again, my sanity was saved by the kindness of a stranger. At 2:00 one morning, a visitor appeared in my office: the engineer responsible for making the PowerPC system disk master. He explained things this way: “Apple is a hardware company. There are factories far away building Apple computers. One of the final steps of their assembly line is to copy all of the system software from the ‘Golden Master’ hard disk onto each computer’s hard disk. I create the Golden Master and FedEx it to the manufacturing plant. In a very real and pragmatic sense, I decide what software does and does not ship.” He told me that if I gave him our software the day before the production run began, it could appear on the Golden Master disk.
I’d bet money the mysterious engineer that saved the day was a release engineer.
This is a minor historical footnote in Apple’s history, but it’s a fascinating look at the policies, environment, camaraderie, and engineering spirit of the company in its previous life; definitely worth a few minutes.
(Via @othiym23, originally via @raum.)
I must admit: one of the things I do miss the most is creating the golden masters. I’m young enough to have not had to worry about it for years, but old enough to have had to do it for a few products that I shipped.
I think we might have a different mentality about software release process and quality if we still went through that ritual today, and it actually involved cardboard boxes, pieces of plastic to hold the bits, and shipping trucks.
I’m guessing that a last-minute respin was a lot more gut-wrenching when you had a bunch of CDs already being pressed.
@Ted,
Oh, I’m sure.
Having the ability to auto-update in the field has really changed how managers and VPs think of releasing software.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that fundamental shift in thinking, but I do think never having had to consider shipping software on plastic, in cardboard, with trucks, to stores (or running BBSes, where people could call in at 9600 bps and get their update floppies!) makes people more prone to make what I would professionally consider “poor decisions.”
I think it also gives the impression that it’s totally acceptable to ship garbage, because, hey, “You can always update it in the field.”
It has arguably removed any focus that was remaining on quality and craftsmanship in the industry. (It’s notable that many of these managers have moved toward web-based startups, where clearly, the dynamic is different.)