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Comment by sdevonoes | Hacker News Reader

> In order for her to work on the movie while out, they had plugged the machine up to the local network and copied the whole file tree over.

Now image the same situation in 2022:

- there is no acceptable backup for the whole movie (or let's say, app)

- only you know there is one acceptable copy... but it's on your personal laptop. You did copy it back in the day because, well, let's say you wanted to run the app in our local machine

There is no way you would tell your team/boss: "Hey guys, no worries! I have a perfect copy of it!", because why on earth did you copy work material into your personal laptop?! That's the rule number 1 of every modern tech company: don't mix work stuff with personal laptop (and the other way around: don't use work laptop for personal stuff).

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- If you can trust an employee with a $25K ($50K today) computer, trusting them with a complete source tree isn't a stretch.

- I'd be more pissed off that somebody didn't have a complete backup somewhere, even if it was a personal laptop they used for work.

- Back then, most people didn't have home computers. Hell nowadays a home pc isn't a guarantee, as most of my (non-engineering) coworkers only have cellphones and ipads at home. And while I agree don't mix work and play, most of these people do.

> Back then, most people didn't have home computers.

you had a much different perspective of 99 than I did.

That factoid might have been true for-the-public-at-large, but certainly not for the offices of large CGI or dev firms.

> for-the-public-at-large

True. Most of the people I knew with computers back then had them provided by their work, or bought them for university.

But then I lived in a small city in Texas not near a major metro. Most people there didn't buy a home pc until the DotCom boom brought those cheap emachines.

I decided to look it up. In 2000, 51% of households had a computer a 41% had internet. https://www.infoplease.com/math-science/computers-internet/u...

And by the next year that had jumped to 56% and 50% respectively. That's 25 million Americans who got the Internet in a 12 month period. And that 2000 number was up from 36.6% and 18% in 1997.

You can't project backward two years from a 2000 number during that era. You're missing data points during the steepest part of the curve.

Animated movies take years to make.

> The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits he’s foggy on the exact date.

In 1998 we were living in Internet Time. The amount of stuff that changed from '97 to '98 and from '98 to '99 made people's heads spin. Google incorporated in September of 1998. 56K modems were brand new that year. At the end of 1999 when Toy Story 2 came out, Napster had been out for 5 months, and Java 1.2 was just about to exit from beta into general availability.

People were still introducing each other to WinAmp when they started storyboarding this movie.

The computer in question was a Silicon Graphics workstation (pictured in the article). What the image does not convey is the sheer gargantuan size of SG machines. Desktop computing it may have been, but in some cases people actually used their SG boxes as physical desktops.

The SG Octane that features in this story was actually one of the more petit versions, but still it would take two people to move comfortably.

One is shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHsA8iq4N0s

SG machines used to be the object of desire for all digital artists, sadly now gone the way of all things.

> sadly now gone the way of all things

Which is to say, overpriced on eBay and yet mostly unusable without now-discontinued proprietary applications and compilers.

Susman was the Supervising Technical Director and the machine was a Silicon Graphics workstation. Certainly sounds like she was given a work machine to do her job.

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