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Comment by icepush | Hacker News Reader

"So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server"

Is this what it feels like to be old?

It’s interesting how relative this is, reading by the comments and stories around them. A previous coworker started computing in the punch card era and would tell stories of dropping your stack of cards and having to reorder them, using the printouts to debug, and so on. And helping develop what’s now known as fork() for processes (although it predated fork and he had his own name for it), and helping develop a commercial RDBMS before they existed all in a non tech industry career.

So when I read about Exchange Server to me it still feels quite modern.

Don't frame it as a negative. This is what it feels like to know things that other people don't know.

Is being old a negative?

It is neither a positive nor a negative.

As my dad would say, it’s kind of the point. Being old is better than the alternative.

Statistically yes, in terms of personal health.

60 years after birth you're either old or you're dead, so not too bad.

I doubt it has something to do with being old, running an email server of any kind, let alone knowing how email works, let alone using email, have been all various abstractions to help make users into consumers who pay more than people who know how to build and run this infrastructure.

To test our code changes, we would check out a VM that was running Microsoft Windows Server edition which was a beefy VM that was running Exchange. It was a carbon copy of the server running in production.

The Exchange code base frankly was a behemoth. No one had a full understanding of how it worked E2E. I am just sharing how I understood it. I was only a lowly L63 btw.

Explaining Exchange to us older folks is like explaining an iPhone to younger generations. :p

As an aside, I worked on Lotus Domino—IBM's competitor to MS Exchange—before it was sold it off in 2018.

>Lotus Domino

Oh, the memories. That login screen with the changing hieroglyphics [1] is forever burned into my mind.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080220070921/http://lotusnotes...

> The hierglyphics on the left of the dialog box are supposed to distract someone who is peering over your shoulder trying to learn your password as you type.

lmao... but is it actually random or is it a hash of your password to make sure you typed it correctly?

iirc, its a hash with server secret. The idea was you can tell if the dialog is the real one, not just some look-the-same dialog from random malware

why did Lotus desktop download emails only every 15 (?) minutes?

I remember people phoning to say "I"ve sent you an email, press the manual refresh button to get it faster".

up to this day I ask if companies use Lotus and those who remember just shake their heads

All email was like this at one time. In the 90s we were told to expect emails to take a few hours.

If you want immediate response use IRC or actually phone someone.

If was like this because it was designed before networks were expected to be fully connected at any one time. Mail would hop its way towards its destination as intermediate nodes dialed in over modem to upstreams.

It was like that because each check/send process was pop3 call that looked more like processing a queue of work for offline clients.

Now it’s more like being subscribed and listening for events.

The transition from POP to IMAP was a big step forward, back in the day.

I had email at my house, in the early 90's, over a UUCP feed. It polled every 4 hours.

I still manually check for mail. I don't want distracting notifications popping up at random.

Think about it in context. Polling constantly would consume a non-trivial amount of both bandwidth and server resources. 15 second intervals would require 60 times as many very expensive servers to handle a certain number of users as 15 minutes would.

And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.

Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.

This seemed a little hard to believe but it sounded like it was more of a replication where it was downloading things into an offline mode where you then write your emails and send them back again period. Other email clients might do this as well if you're running it on your desktop.

“Domino” just seems like a really bad name for a server/cloud product. The memes! The analogies!

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