"Hen Front-Ends" and the Central Nervous Center of SharePoint 1910

It's certainly been an exciting few days for me here at Shampoo Nation; I met a few of the other information technologists here in the office last week, after they offered to swap "war stories" with me. I offered to start, and began to recount Barnaby's terrifying encounter with Wilhelm II, but apparently that wasn't the sort of war story they were talking about. 

Instead, everyone started complaining about "server problems", something I'm a certifiable expert with. Everyone's had a problem with a server that caused them to nearly snap their bifocals in a rage; for me, it was the Winter of '52, when a unpleasant crab apple of a woman brought me my usual fish sandwich at Penny's, the eatery I used to visit down by where Marvin's Apothecary used to be, over on 3rd and Elm. Now, I didn't come into Penny's that morning looking for trouble -- I'd already had it on account of working with the newfangled "Nationaled Security Agentry" the boys and I were assigned to out in Maryland. All I asked for was my fish sandwich and a decent cup of coffee with TWO sugars, and that horrible, shrill waitress of ours brought me back a boiling cauldron of the most bitter swill I've ever tasted. And when I had the temerity to call her out on it -- in the middle of Penny's, no less -- well, that insufferable harpy challenged me to a brew-off right there in the town square that very afternoon. It ended up being quite the event, attended by no less than Mayor Harold S. Decauter and the editor of the Mercantile-Times, who I believe, at the time, was the late Elmer Woodleby, rest his soul. 

So yes, I know a server problem when I see one, or when it brings me a bad cup of coffee. 

Political Pressure and The First Avian Networks

As it turns out, this wasn't what the fellows at Shampoo had in mind; apparently this "modern" implementation of SharePoint handles input and output requests via MACHINE, something we never got off the ground back when SharePoint 1910 was being deployed. Some young whippersnapper in the information technologist's pool asked me if we used a system similar to A.U.D.R.E.Y. II, which I chronicled for you last week. Balderdash!!! What kind of tomfoolery do you think we took part in back in the old days? Even we knew that no woman, or man even, could possibly handle the tens, or maybe hundreds of input/output requests a SharePoint 1910 deployment would encounter in an industrial environment! 

Honestly, I don't even know how this generation manages to get its trousers on. 

So how, then, did we handle regulating such a busy thoroughfare of bits and half bits? With modern technology, of course! 

Remember, by the time many of SharePoint 1910's components were actually implemented, we were deep into the Great Depression, and as a federal project, we were often saddled with the prospect of making some of the nation's less desirable economic sectors profitable again. One way this was attempted was by converting pre-industrial products, such as fruit, slate, and livestock, into commodities that could be used in the exploding information economy of the 20th century. Henrietta, pictured above, was the first attempt to do central processing via livestock, a noble effort that never got completely off the ground for a number of reasons, among them the fact that -- despite what you may have learned in your primary schoolings -- most varieties of edible poultry are very, very, very bad at rapid integer calculations. You think you have memory problems today? Try building a collaborative work environment when your mainframe doesn't remember what it was doing three seconds ago!

When it became clear that Henrietta was too slow and, yes, probably too stupid to handle our information load, we tried to ease the burden on her in the hopes that would improve performance. We made sure to speak to her in soothing voices, read her the latest articles from Life Magazine, and even, in a fit of desperation, began to bring in additional Computational Avians to distribute the work across a number of "Hen Front-Ends".

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Of course, this didn't work at all, as you can see. Even the most advanced networks are limited by their slowest bottleneck, and in our case, the bottleneck was that small, edible birds aren't particularly good at math, or following directions barked angrily by a small Polish woman from New Brunswick. That's right -- we ended up hiring Audrey back, pictured above, and putting her to work on our new "Server Farm" (this time, it was literally a farm in New Jersey), in a futile attempt to salvage our efforts, but after several months, even the WPA wasn't about to honor our request for the additional 77,000 chickens I had requested for the second beta. Some poppycock about "diminishing returns". That's not the kind of thinking that wins a war, is it?

Fortunately, we got to fire Audrey again. She was worse than that terrible waitress at Penny's.