Undo. Redo.

There's something deeply satisfying about removing an old network with a box cutter and a pair of scissors. Slicing the old cables and pulling them through walls and cable clips without any regard for their use is quite fun, especially after the meticulous work involved in installing the new wires beforehand. The book store where my wife works is finally jumping head-first into the 21st century, updating their VT200-based stock keeping and point of sale system to a PC-based system. Out with the telephone-cable-based 'network', in with the new. Shiny new Cat-5e cables, gigabit switches and routers, WiFi - it's been an interesting but fun task so far. And we're barely 25% done. I have to look forward to installing 4 more PCs, data migration off the old system, setting up a rigorous backup facility, antivirus, password management - the lot.
Which is curious and odd because way back at school, in my computer science class (realise I'm talking about 1985 or 1986 here) were given a project to theorise how we'd bring a shop into the computer age. My choice at the time? Computerising the stock-keeping and point of sale system in a book shop.
Go figure.

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