🚀 go-pugleaf

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com writes:

> On Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 4:13:53 PM UTC-4, Lynn Wheeler wrote:
>> S/360 announce 4/7/1964, 54yrs
>> http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PR360.html
>> 
>> ... and from 34yrs ago
>> 
>> we had regular Friday's after work and one of the discussions was that
>> most of middle management and executives were computer illiterate
>> ... and could we create something that would attract them to using
>> computers. We came up with the idea of doing online telephone books. Jim
>> Gray would write the lookup application and I would create the
>> collection and formating process ... but neither of us would use more
>> than 2weeks of our time (note this was later picked up by and shipped by
>> PROFs). One of the hardest problems were site security that believed
>> computer/soft copies of paper phone books violated security.  From long
>> ago and far away:
> [snip]
>
> That is strange that something like an internal telephone
> directory would be a security threat, especially years ago
> when computer access was more tightly controlled than now.
>
> Years ago my PPOE moved its internal phone book to the VM machine.
> Was a lot easier to use.  However, all it had was the alpha listing
> of individuals; it did not have dialing instructions nor listings
> by department.

At Bell Labs and it's descendants, we had the "dq" command.
(Directory Query).
The UNIX version had a nice phonetic search.  You really only
had to approximate the name you were looking for.
You could get "dq" to return a full list of all employees.
A few employees used this to build a tool that would track
new hires and fires.  You could get on a distribution list
and get weekly updates on changes within the company.

Sadly dq eventually died and we ended up with Microsoft
contact lists.

> Sadly, today, it's difficult to reach many companies by telephone,
> even tiny ones, because everyone has a computer front end and the
> caller is forced to wade through multiple menus.

My last 10 years of employment I never answered the phone.
Somewhere along the line I had forgotten my password to
voice mail and stopped caring.  I felt if they didn't
send email, they really didn't want to contact me.

-- 
Dan Espen