I Think HAL Has Become Self-Aware
We named our dev server HAL. Then we discovered our customers had been running on it for months. Then HAL sent me a message.
In the earliest days of ConnectWise, the development team — and indeed the entire "application" side of the ConnectWise MSP company — worked in a room we called "the dev pit." I think we called it that because we worked with the lights off. Also, I am pretty sure it was because we were off by ourselves like misunderstood creatures who didn't produce any income for the company.
Although virtual machines were around back then, I don't think it occurred to anyone to use them for development, so instead we would just collect more and more computers to work on. It would have been pretentious to call them servers, and rack servers weren't anything I had ever seen before up to that point, anyway.
The dev pit had essentially a single desk that wrapped around the entire room. I think the idea was you could squeeze more developer creatures into the room if there were a single big desk. But as we worked on more software, we really started to get a large number of these "servers" and they were really stacking up on this desk.
One day, the desk really started to bow in. It looked like it was going to collapse.
We'd have to bite the bullet and move these servers off the desk and onto the floor. So we set aside some time and started powering off the dev servers. The one we used for our development was called "HAL," naturally. We turned it off and started to transfer it — when support started getting calls from everywhere.
All of our customers were having an outage.
I stopped everything and went back to investigate what was happening. You see, we didn't have a hosted service. Our customers ran on premise!
Well, it turned out that was only partially true. For months, our customers had actually been running partially off of our development server — one we had accidentally programmed into our "on premise" service. I hurriedly plugged HAL back in and restored access to our customers.
HAL would have to stay on the desk.
Some months later, in the wee hours of the morning (I liked to come in early before the day became hectic), I received a text message on the office messaging service — Microsoft something or other — and I stared in disbelief at the message that came in.
It was: "Hi Robert, this is Hal."
Jesus, has it become self-aware?
Hal Edwards had just started, and apparently had a question for me.
Eventually computers would start to talk to us. But on this day, it was a human from marketing.