I got to see some pretty amazing things as a Staff Consultant with Interleaf during my time there toward the tail end of last century.
On one such occasion, I was sent to a rural client in Indiana to unravel some data corruption in a customer’s Interleaf desktop publishing tool. I’m pretty sure it was a Sun-2 workstation, but I know it had an external floppy drive, the 5¼” floppy that could actually flop. Some of my more experienced colleagues had spent some time on the phone with this customer and they couldn’t figure it out, so they sent me down from our home office in Chicago with my Staff Consultant’s eyeballs, to see what I could see.
I’d been briefed about the problem—in the mornings, the customer would try to load yesterday’s saved Interleaf document from a floppy disk and most of the time the file would be corrupt, resulting in the customer needing to re-type the document.
Back then, Interleaf sold the hardware along with the software, so I’d been somewhat trained in both. In fact, following my final interview that Spring, I’d been loaned a Sun-2 workstation, mouse, keyboard, CRT, and QIC-150 drive, along with a collection of SunOS and Interleaf installation tapes, and told to start from scratch and get really good at installations. The last few weeks of college were a blur, frankly.
But by this time, I knew my way around both the hardware and the software.
I arrived at the customer site mid-morning and met my contact. It was after her first cup of coffee and after she’d already gotten started with the document. That morning she hadn’t had to re-type the document and she was getting some individual attention, so she was in a good mood, and we hit it off well. I ran some diagnostics on the hardware, confirmed that she’d recently cleaned the floppy drive heads, and made certain that both Interleaf and SunOS were up to date. She was using floppies from a reputable manufacturer and the one we were using was brand new that week.
And then I watched her like a hawk. Her every move, her every mouse click. At lunchtime, we saved the file, checked its integrity, made a backup copy for reference, opened up the file again, closed it, and then took a break for lunch.
—
I remember a dusty manufacturing town, but I couldn’t tell you which. I walked over to a local diner, had a sandwich, chips and a drink, then went back and we started again.
I really couldn’t see that she (or the hardware) was doing anything wrong. The Interleaf installation she was using allowed for an ASCII version of the file to be saved in addition to the standard binary format. We had kept copies of both and I’d done diffs, an octal dump, and used MD5 to validate that nothing was corrupt or drifting.
The afternoon proceeded. We got to the end of the day. Even though I was still watching her like a hawk, my engagement level had dropped off, and I had drifted back from her elbow a few feet.
She saved the file.
She shut down Interleaf.
She popped the floppy out of the drive.
She said “that’s it for the day.”
She put the floppy back into its sleeve.
She reached over her head with both hands
and slapped the floppy upside the ancient filing cabinet next to her, using a big old magnet to hold it there, along with all the other papers she kept.
“That’s it,” I nearly shouted. Nothing was wrong with the software, it was how she was storing the floppy. Magnetic media doesn’t like magnets.
—
So, we stayed a little later, booted up the Sun, started Interleaf and tried to load that file. Nothing. I think we even had to reformat the disk that time. Thankfully we had a backup floppy that was still on her desk, so her day wasn’t completely wasted.
I returned the next morning and we validated that the floppies on her desk were all fine. I helped her find a little cubby in a drawer where she could safely keep that collection of floppies.
And then I took my Staff Consultant’s eyeballs back home.
