In 2001 I was answering phones for a company that used OS2/Warp on the desktop, while I tried to find a technical job as the dot-coms crashed.

Warp was six years old at the time, and pretty terrible compared to then-modern alternatives. It was a dinosaur.

Legacy applications and the enterprise directory services infrastructure made the switching costs so high that it would be another year or so before they were able to switch to Windows XP.

Luckily the OS is becoming irrelevant. Ignoring the cloud ~computing~ marketing noise: cheap open-protocol traffic tunneling, multi-platform presentation layer client/server authentication and application projection, virtualization, and SaaS offerings are killing the OS market stranglehold. With this lower barrier to entry, expect fun innovations on the desktop. What will change with multi-touch projection walls or tables, universal wireless network access, e-paper, and irrelevant local storage and battery life concerns?

Actually, I’m just looking forward to not using Windows XP. It is a dinosaur.

None of us have a truly paperless office. The entire idea is an unreal sales pitch. We do have an mostly paperless office.

Don’t think so? Look at this governmental office scene from the beginning of the 20th century. Those books are not decorative testimonials of owner style and taste to be discussed, or lent to visiting information workers, or even more rarely, referenced. Those filing cabinets are not full of contractual records preserved for compliance reasons. Well, they might have some of those, but mostly they are the operational raw data of the business, and in this place, of the government.

They are the file servers.

More than half the people in that photo are now, in fact, infrastructure. Reassemble this operation with modern equipment and they will be right-sized.

Look how nice those pieces of infrastructure dress for work! My, how low the cubical walls are, why it’s almost the revolutionary open floor plan style office I’ve read about tech companies using in so many business articles!

Are all the file drawers open as staging for the photo, or is that the actual equivalent of locking an open file folder directory?

Unrelated and cool: Note the ghosts in the farthest depth of the picture.