[kingcharles]

Super secret things often go this way too, to avoid potential loss or theft.

I was working on the demo software for the on-stage reveal of a certain super secret cell phone from a certain manufacturer. Every time the phone had to have its firmware updated or the hardware switched out some guy had to come to my office and carry it back in-person to the HQ.

I remember one time I wrote the codename of the device on the outside of the anonymous box because I was worried the courier person might end up just leaving it at the reception at HQ and then the box would get opened by someone who shouldn't be seeing it. I thought having the codename on the outside would at least let it get routed internally to the team working on it.

I got a very, very angry phone call from someone at certain manufacturer swearing and cursing at me saying that someone could have seen the name and everything would have been exposed, blah blah. Total bullshit.

In the end the demo went ahead successfully in front of a world-wide audience. The live demo was supposed to be loaded onto some certain servers, but time ran out and it ended up running off a PC in my business partner's closet over his home DSL. A certain CEO was not aware of this as he held the device on stage. Watching the event on a stream from the BBC was a pants soiling moment.

[eashman]

Back in the day I upped the RAM and put a set of virtual machines on our VP of Marketing’s laptop with copies of our staging server, db, data… the works. He just started it up and browsed away.

He loved doing demos without a network connection etc. Back then WiFi was always restricted and hot spots too slow.