prologue: if anyone who was there remembers this story differently and/or wants to add to it send a pr and i’ll consider merging it. maybe lol.
we (advanced labelling systems aka als) did a demo in like 94 at bose; bose at the time was this very heterogeneous shop, par for the course in the boston metrowest area in that era sigh, all kinds of crazy mix of unix workstations, macs, pc’s, amigas, you name it they had many of them. this excited me immensely of course lol; we had a couple hours to prep for the demo/meeting, and one of the things we wanted to do was pull one of bose’s actual speaker labels and show how we could make the contents dynamic, etc so they could print their labels with you know actual info not rely on pre-printed labels with just monotonically incrementing serial numbers; they wanted to encode the location where the thing was built, what production line, date/timestamp you get the idea; so after the obligatory tour of bose and all the cool shit at bose and of course NO PHOTOGRAPHY ALLOWED lol they set me up in a cubicle with a network jack and some guest creds and the hostname of an ftp server with well bose on it lolol okay it wasn’t EVERYTHING but it was a lot of stuff. so i see all these goodies and i’m like okay imma need to not just grab this .tiff of the label we’re gonna demo for them but like, you know EVERYTHING on this ftp server or as much as will fit on idk what the hell i had with me, i think i might’ve actually brought my dev workstation? maybe it was a laptop with a pcmcia ethernet card? anyhow i started my ncftp snarfing and about five minutes later two or three guys show up at the cubicle and peer in at me and say “found him” and ask me what i’m up to lol “why?” i said “well, our network is all of the sudden super slow and well it’s coming from this network jack and btw who exactly are you?” so i mean i had a visitor’s badge and i don’t remember where anyone else from the als crew was but i told them the half-truth about needing a label for a demo see here’s all this label printing equipment and idk i thought i was just grabbing some .tiff’s for the demo they told me to ctrl-c that shit. so i complied and that was enough of a scare for me to slow my roll and get back on track and actually finish what i was supposed to with the .tiff’s for the demo. okay still with me? lol i get to work on the .tiff’s i’m gonna use, do the needful with prepping it to work with their .tiff’s, blah blah blah, now it’s demo time. my turn, and i go up there in front of everyone full eager-beaver, fully-caffeinated mode, in this conf room at bose with two or three of bose’s documentation designers, some bose managers, and the als peeps kile, bob the owner of als and his bff/lieutenant (can’t remember his name he had a heart attack and died while he and bob were deboarding a flight, very sad) and one the docs people was like “oh this is very nice we like it but it seems a bit too good, is this staged?” oh no you didn’t just say that you mf’er challenge accepted “no, give me a file rn i’ll convert it and show you” docs person goes and gets a diskette with a different .tiff on it, hands it me, i open it in our label designer app and… garbage. just a mostly black scrambled image. wth?? this should work perfectly, i wrote the .tiff image handling myself… try opening it in a different app real quick same there’s some nervousness creeping into our camp mostly unhelpful suggestions leaning towards maybe i don’t know what i’m doing grrxor i’m playing it cool i know there’s an answer here… yes! eureka!! i know! they designed these on 68k macs! those are big endian machines, and our software runs on pc’s, they’re little endian! that’s gotta be it!! i blurt this out “oh i figured it out! these tiffs are from 68k macs which are big endian, our labelling software runs on intel processors which are little endian! the tiffs i got from your ftp server must’ve already been in the correct byte order. no problem! i have a utility which will fix it” proceed to fix the endian-ness, ace the demo, nerds in the room slow clap and each give me a crisp $100 bill you get the idea. on the ride back everyone in the car is very excite we got the contract! good job young computer nerd boy! but one thing we didn’t understand, what was with the BIG INDIANS and LITTLE INDIANS thing and why was everyone at bose impressed by that??? dead 😂😂😂
p.s. literally just today (32 years later??) did i consider big-indian/little-indian in the context of that dr. bose had bengali antecedents what exactly does that add to the story you’re asking well not much; i’m pretty sure that als bob and his lieutenant really did mean first nations indians not sub-continent indians but awkward me wants to acknowledge that dr bose might be misidentified as indian and that adds another crinkle to this rambly blurb of a story.
p.p.s. also just found out that the majority owner of bose is mit, neat! mens et manus!