I jumped to MD in 1997 because I was still using cassette for mobile music consumption. Because of the media size, there wasn't a pocketable portable CD player, and skipping was a problem (that got fixed later) so I never switched to CD for mobile use.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.
Because if they had a choice of paying someone to answer questions for free or paying them to develop features that generate revenue, which one do you think they pick? Yes, there's the whole narrative about customer satisfaction and call deflection and quality and whatever else. Every FAANG's got rooms full of people looking at data stream in, and they all say "I bet if we do nothing, they'll just throw it in the garbage and buy a new one."
If you want a fast answer to a question from Microsoft, have your company pay two hundred grand a year (or more) for Unified Enterprise Support. They will be more than happy to spend hours on the phone with you working on your exact problem. One time I had them set up a conference call at two in the morning to show a team how to set up some byzantine Platform Builder installation, in Korean. Money talks.
In about 2002, I had a Handspring Visor Prism, running PalmOS. I bought the VisorPhone, which was a cellular phone add-on that plugged into the back. It was somewhat ungainly, and didn't work well as a voice phone. It also had a separate battery, so you had to charge it on its own. I could use it as a cellular modem, but there wasn't a good practical use case for it, because there were only half-baked web browsers and few apps that used data. You could dial in to your desktop computer over the modem and sync remotely. It was fairly useless, but was the early precursor of what eventually became the Treo, and showed that the combination of cell phone and PDA was a good idea.
Interesting - I'm curious if the small labels doing releases are using recordable magneto-optical MDs. (I'm assuming so.)
In its heyday, there were a limited number of prerecorded releases, mostly from Sony. They didn't use M-O discs, and were pressed aluminum/plastic inside the shutter case, similar to a CD. They were supposedly much cheaper per-unit, but with a high setup cost.
I still have a handful of the prerecorded ones. My favorite is Pink Floyd's _Delicate Sound of Thunder_, which was two MDs in a special dual case that fit no storage system ever imaginable. Just looked these up on eBay, and I think I figured out my retirement plan.
Gopher was a pretty brief blip in my career, but I remember being insanely excited about it for about three months of 1991.
Apple's OpenDoc was a pretty neat idea, until I actually tried it on an anemic Centris computer in 1996.
And I still have a few hundred MiniDiscs and a couple of players in storage. From 1997-2002 or so, those were in daily use on my subway commute, until the iPod came along.
Seldom, except when we on-boarded new people. This was mostly to counter when the folks on one continent would feel left out when folks on another continent were given custom training, and the feeling that institutional knowledge was being hoarded by different teams.
(In reality, they were doing a lot more off-boarding than on-boarding in my last year there. And thanks to agile and daily releases, nobody had any free time to do less important things like training, days off, or sleeping.)
Look up the history of FM broadcast automation for more on how this worked - it's fascinating. Starting in the 60s, companies like Drake-Chenault started implementing these Rube Goldberg-esque analog systems that involved tapes with subaudible tones at the ends of songs that would trigger a relay system playing other tapes or cartridges with commercials on them. Stations would subscribe to a service that would send them new tapes with the latest Top 40, AOR, or MOR hits, and then they'd record carts for local ads, weather, and news.
I'm a manager. (Sorry.) I do a weekly Friday "Ask me anything" on Zoom that's basically a free-form training session where people reporting to me (or other teams are fine, too) ask about how to do something or how we should be doing something, and we walk through it in video.
One reason I started this is we had a mix of junior people, people who came in from acquisitions, and people who had changed tools and weren't sure of best practices. This stuff was supposed to be documented in wiki pages, and a lot of times it was, but when we'd run through it hands-on, we'd find details that weren't documented or had gone stale.
Another reason is that formal written-in-advance training sessions are overbearing for everyone involved. They take too much time to prepare, too much time to give, nobody pays attention because they don't like being talked to, and if things go off script, the presenter has to scramble to adapt. It was better for someone to say on Monday "I need to know more about how we're supposed to be doing GitHub PR reviews" and then on Friday, I'd have a post-it of notes and we'd fire up a browser, go through a fake PR or look at an old one, and maybe talk about pain points or what isn't working.
Also, we'd record these and store them for posterity, and so people in other time zones could catch them later.
NASA first addressed this during the Skylab training. They sent two of each crew to a 14-day crash course at an Air Force dental clinic, where they took volunteers and started pulling teeth from patients.
What about a list of open-source projects in the Ukraine to support?
Of course I'd chip in a few bucks to sponsor companies on GitHub. But I can imagine there are enterprise companies that work in an OSS repo that are going to have bad resource problems and may struggle to survive (literally).
I realize there's an issue with a learning curve, and I'm just a dumb tech writer, but I'd seriously throw a few hours a day triaging out GitHub issues or doing whatever else I could to help.
Spent ten years at a Vista company that I won't name, half before acquisition and half after, and all of this pretty much tracks. (Maybe not the security guard part, but I can confirm that when you were laid off, you were escorted straight out the door.)
I was a manager and hired people, and I never had a candidate who didn't pass the CCAT. But I'd have to qualify that with "a native speaker of English" and "in the US." I never hired in India or elsewhere overseas, but I heard from other managers that this could be a challenge, which makes me think the CCAT was a convenient way of weeding out "non-culture fits."
As far as layoffs and CCATs, they layoff decisions were always a few steps above me in the org chart, but what I observed was that the last couple of rounds were very directly related to employee age. NOT tenure, although being there for 20 years meant you were on the chopping block to be replaced by a few HPELs. But I saw people who were 50+ and only around a few years get cut. Maybe it was due to salary, maybe not. Officially, it was due to "a formula" that included "several factors" because of course basing layoffs on age is illegal.
Annual reviews were a bit bogus, because they were 1-5, with 1 being you were actively involved in a felony against the company, 2 being you were on a PIP, and you couldn't give a 5 to anyone. I would give a scattering of 3s and 4s, and then my boss's boss would say I had too many 4s, so effectively everyone was a 3, which doesn't do much for the "several factors." (It did play well into massively underfunding the bonus pool, though.)
The only other part missing from your story is how between every layoff cycle, there would be a giant rumor that Broadcom or Oracle or someone was going to buy the company for the rolodex and real estate, and fire everyone they couldn't offshore.
If you don't believe that, or thing that sounds petty or stupid, ask yourself why.
Do you feel like you need the job to survive financially? Work on that. Go read about FIRE. Look at how much money you spend and make. Pay off debt. Build a cushion. Spend less. Figure out how to get out of that hole until you can look at your paycheck in one hand and the pile of bullshit from your job in the other, and say "it's just a job."
Do you feel like you'd never find another job? Start career development. Take classes. Get certificates. Learn new skills. Tell your boss you need time at work for personal development to keep relevant and contribute at your company. Get them to pay for it. Get yourself to the point where if you had to walk, you have three other places begging to take you. You can say it's just a job if there are many more out there waiting for you.
Lack of sleep, depression, exhaustion, stress, and other physical and mental issues are a big problem, and those need to be addressed. Eat right, sleep enough, take care of yourself, see a doctor, see a therapist. Lots of good advice on this thread, and some of it may work, some of it may not. But as long as your life is defined by your job, you'll come back and the same thing will happen again. It's just a job. Tell yourself that until you believe it.
It's also worth noting that Wind River purchased Integrated Systems almost entirely so they could kill off pSOS and drive customers to using their competing VxWorks RTOS. I wouldn't doubt if FlexOS is in a similar situation.
It's very likely if you talked to someone at Wind River, they would say "why would you want to release FlexOS for free when you could license VxWorks for a large price instead?"
Markdown, Gatsby. Source is in GitHub, GHA builds the HTML output, then schleps it over to an S3 bucket.
I inherited this setup. Works great from my end, but we've got an engineering team that set it up and owns the plumbing of everything. That's key, because many orgs have a "we set it up, now it runs forever and you deal with it" mentality. And Gatsby has a super steep learning curve. And I'm not a designer.
Previously used Jekyll and still use it (minimally) for my blog. Jekyll is okay but once you get past a couple hundred pages, performance gets exponentially worse. Had a site with a few thousand pages, and builds would take an hour or more. And that org had the aforementioned problem. A team designed it, then got laid off, and I'm trying to read a dummies book to figure out what size hammer to hit the thing with.
I've been in this for 25 years, so I've used about everything else. Flare, DITA, FrameMaker, RoboHelp, PageMaker. No typewriters, thankfully.
Picked up one of these as a kid at a garage sale for a buck, mostly to take it apart and see how it worked. Internally, it was a board with maybe a dozen daughter boards, each a vertically-mounted, removable card. All transister-diode logic. The game "cartridges" were just cards with different jumper wires inside them that physically rewired the system.
In addition to the overlays, it came with dice, money, poker chips, and some other board game components you used in conjunction with the video game itself. I'm guessing everyone promptly lost all of this, which would make a complete system even more rare.
Magnavox didn't sell many of these, but made their real money patenting everything and then suing Atari and anyone else making a video game system attaching to a TV.
Compared to tapes, MiniDisc was a godsend: no eaten tapes, random access playback, smaller size, better sound, song titles, and it was just so cool looking. I also used a MiniDisc a lot to record and transcribe meetings at work. The live audio recording was excellent.
The main disadvantage I ran into was that even with an optical digital connection, recording a 60-minute album from CD to MD took 60 minutes. I seldom ran into recordable media or prerecorded titles in the wild, even in New York (although Tower carried them), but there were lots of good online stores back then to buy blanks and new players.
I stuck with it until 2002, when the second-generation iPods showed up. It was easier to carry one thing, and not a player and a bunch of loose discs. I still have a giant anvil road case with a few hundred of them in storage, although who knows if they delaminate or turn into oil over the decades.