5typos.net
Fun Old-School Telco Story
Rui Carmo on taoofmac.com:
This oddly shaped, unwieldy chunk of purple plastic (which is around 6cm to a side, if you’re wondering) has been on my office desk for nearly twenty years now, and despite it being fundamentally useless (it doesn’t even make for a good paperweight) I keep it as a daily reminder of how dogma and preconceived notions can turn well-meaning engineering into a massive iceberg of technical debt.
Great story from the dinosaur days of the web on telco infrastructure design and implementation.