Traditionally, the end of the year is a time of reflection. In good times, we congratulate ourselves on what we did right, and in bad times we brood over our mistakes.
The past year has been hard on a lot of people, and especially those in the technology industry. I think far too much has already been written listing and analyzing the mistakes that were made, so rather than rehash old complaints, I'd like to tell a story about things gone right, one that has become something of a legend in the computer industry: the story of IBM's Black Team.
The computing world was different in the 1960s. Computers were huge and expensive, and required full-time staff to keep them running. Product cycles were scheduled in years not months. Tasks modern programming tools do in seconds took weeks. And whenever a new computer model was developed, the operating system and all applications had to be developed from scratch.