A Reassuring Murmur

How a debugging “comment” became a user feature

In my 90’s consulting career, one of my clients was the state Department of Agriculture, specifically one of their research groups. I think it was a kind of general problem tracking system for an expert phone line service.

I was using 4D for these kinds of projects, which had pretty expensive server licensing. They had a limited number of scientists who would be available to take the calls and decided that they really only needed two people able to use it at the same time.

But, they did need those two people to be able to log the data nearly simultaneously — it needed to have a single database. The server licensing was pushing their budget, especially as an ongoing cost. Also, they didn’t have a spare Mac on which they could run the server.

I found a third-party plugin which provided network connections so you could setup some peer-peer comms between a couple of 4D programs. Perfect!

(There was a mis-step for a bit where I tried to outsource the comms code locally but the company did such a bad job, I had to re-do it all myself, later.)

We’re not talking.

The local network could occasionally be a bit flaky and there was no real status tracker to let the scientists…