technology history story:
it's 1989, and we're unexpectedly making big bucks working for a small startup dealing with databases (and mapping software) for museums and environmental organisations, which was tonnes of funne
our friend has coded a routine to import millions of records for a bird demographics project originally input into some terrible software, and he can't understand why his routine is performing so slowly
we take a look at the code, and at the progress display onscreen, and then we rewrite a few lines and the code runs almost 100x faster
he thinks we've performed magic but guess what the bottleneck was
his code showed the number of records imported on the screen of a laptop, and updated for each record imported - and the screen refresh rate was the bottleneck, because early laptop screens were slow af, so it literally took many times as long to update the screen as it did to import a record, and some bad buffering shit going on meant this also slowed down the whole import loop itself
we just tweaked the code so instead of showing number of records imported, it only updated each time the percentage done rose by 0.1% so the user still had something to ogle
we feel like there's some point to telling you about this and it's not just ooh weren't we clever - okay we were but only because we were autistic and thought sideways - but maybe the point is something about information saturation not being the best way to get shit done
and it still amazes us that we went from "never used a computer" to "in charge of an entire large museum's computer needs" in like three years, and being autistic and interested was how that happened (nobody taught us, we just read manuals like they were enchanted turkish delight), and then we landed in that company and learned to program in LISP in like three days because someone was on holiday and something needed writing in a hurry - and it's nice to remember we had a brain once, now that ME has fucked it for us and hmm okay reading this paragraph we guess sometimes info saturation is the way to go but anyway
