Throwback Thursday - The Go Faster

The other day while booting up the computer, I got the notice that the an update was in progress. Seeing the blue progress bar made me laugh.

When I was a computer programmer, I worked for a small, software house. We wrote back office accounting programs (General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, etc.) for the banking industry.

At month end and year end certain reports had to be run. The computer had to crunch a lot of numbers and do lots of calculations to print these reports. Clients were usually told to leave the program running overnight and when they arrived in the morning, the reports would be printed.

One of the Bob's clients either was working late or had started the program and wasn't happy about seeing a blank screen. He asked Bob if  the program could "go faster." Bob told him he would work on the problem and have things ready for the next month end.

Bob had the client call him when the client was ready to run the end of month programs. The program started and the client was delighted to see flashing on his screen "Number of records processed" and a number that kept increasing. Bob told the client the program needed to run overnight and to go home. When he came in the next morning, the reports would be waiting.

Many of us had heard about Bob's Go Faster problem so we all asked what he had done. How could he make the computer crunch all the data and make the program run faster? The answer? He couldn't. But the client didn't want to hear that. So Bob added a patch in the program that would flash a number on the screen every time the program began a calculation and this number would increase until all the calculations had been performed.

"But Bob, that's not going to make the program run faster. That's going to slow the program down a little because it has to keep track of the number of files processed."

"I know that. You know that. The client is just happy to see the dancing baloney on the screen."