Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A little-publicized factor in the computing world is that to understand something, you have to find someone, i.e., a warm body.

Back in the dark ages of computing, I wrote software in a language called FORTRAN. We used FORTRAN code that had been written the pre-dark ages by a group of people we never met. Now and then, i.e., daily, I would find source code that I could not understand. In what was known as comment lines, I would find something like:

See some-person’s-name for an explanation of this code.

This was warmware. To understand something, I had to find someone, i.e., a warm body. Some person had written the code that no one else could understand. That person could explain the code, if you could find that person. The reality was that the person worked at some other place at some other time.

Fast forward to today. I am not programming in FORTRAN, but still I find technical systems where warmware is a critical part. Some person did some thing at some other place at some other time. There is no documentation, no explanation, no sense to any of it.

I suppose there is something about human nature involved in all this warmware stuff. I doubt it will cease any time soon.