But somehow *you* cracked the secret, so the security was actually next to zero.

Yeah, the enemy would never guess that a large office building completely devoid of windows might possibly be a telephone switch.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth E. Boulding

Pro tip: Many automatic transmissions also start out in 2nd gear if you put the shifter in 2nd. They downshift to the selected gear as well.

Congratulations, you feckless imbeciles. You've "innovated" general software package management a mere three $(GOD)-damned decades after Redhat and Debian did it.

While you're at it, why don't you "invent" a tiling window manager that can be driven entirely from the keyboard... Oh, wait...

Honestly... Why is anyone still voluntarily giving money to these chowderheads?

Maybe you went to a technical school with no humanities. Tech classes usually handed out exams with questions and response areas mixed together. Humanities classes with essay answers often used the blue books and separate question sheets. I assume that this is because essay answers vary more in length than technical computations so they didn't have to leave the maximum space after each essay question. Also, they probably wanted the notebook-style blue lines to try to improve the odds that the longhand writing was at least partially legible. (Back then, the available copy machines were all monochrome.)

Remember those little booklets of blank notebook-style paper they gave you in which to physically scrawl your exam answers under the watchful gaze of the proctors?

That was a blue book.

You'll be too intellectually lazy to learn either one of those things so it seems a moot point.

Have you seen the British comedy show The League of Gentlemen? There's an episode with a sketch (also in their live show) about "death by Mau Mau." Except in that joke its about shoving fruit up your butt.

That must have been why flying was so much safer back in Ma Bell's heyday.

The difference doesn't mean a rat's ass to the customer. Either way, no phone call.

OK, but do you really want to go back to paying the current equivalent $10 per minute for the privilege of using a piece of dedicated copper for a cross-country call?

BTW, "nine 9s" is one just second downtime out of 30 years continuous service. I was there back in the day of analog long distance, and I can assure you that reliability was nowhere near that. For example, if you tried to make a call on Mother's day after dinner, your chances of actually getting through were often less than 50%.

Getting a "fast busy signal" when you picked up the phone was also a thing that happened at a couple of other random times per year for no apparent reason. I hate to admit it, but my current VoIP service piped over the crappy cable company's coax is probably just as reliable as our POTS line was 50 or 60 years ago.

Look at your own post. You didn't say anything about "generations" at all.