[afavour]

I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive.

The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.

[oceanplexian]

Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer.

Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.

[afavour]

Okay, as someone who also worked in that era I’ll be pedantic: internal phone systems went down. I experienced it multiple times so I certainly know it happened.

[kazen44]

also, the availability of the routing and switching infrastructure of the internet must be atleast a factor higher then that of the world wide web.

Physical network equipment is redundant and reliant enough that getting 5 minutes of downtime or less per year is totally doable.

the web however... is a far different beast (and in my opinion, with an incentive which does not factor in reliability)

[SJC_Hacker]

> we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one

We don't need it, the owners want it

[chipsrafferty]

We don't need it, but we might need it to maintain our quality of life now.