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Tim, the Hardware Enchanter worked at a small hardware/software company which made specialized instruments for a variety of industrial applications. When he wasn’t busy blowing up the English countryside, he designed hardware as well as its firmware- a mix of C and assembly code- which had to fit into 32KB of program memory with 2KB of RAM. He hardly ever touched application code, and was happy with that arrangement.
The company’s next product was The Probe. It was a device for measuring and testing other hardware, and its data went to a PC for further analysis. Tim helped design the hardware and wrote most of the firmware, then waited on the software team to make the controller application.
And waited. And waited.
Finally, he went to speak with the head of the software team, a disagreeable man named Roger. “Who are you?” the man grumbled, obviously upset at his work being disrupted.
“There are some who call me… Tim?”
“And what is your quest?”
“I need your software for The Probe so we can finish testing on the hardware end,” he answered.
“Yeah, well, we’re busy,” Roger said gruffly. That wasn’t the response Tim was expecting.
“Well, when will you not be busy? We need this software.”
Roger adjusted the arrangement of his keyboard and mouse on his desk before harumphing. “Listen, those of us who arrange and design applications are under considerable stress at this period. We have a lot to do and not enough manpower to finish it all.”
Tim bit back an expletive, “Well, put it on your list. I’ll throw together something quick to finish hardware testing, but we need you guys to come up with something nice before this sells.”
Roger didn’t even respond, and got back to the work of rearranging things on his desk. Tim went back to his office and got to work. He wasn’t really an application-software guy, but he was able to hack together something with a GDI+ GUI to communicate with The Probe. It was ugly, slow, and crashed a lot, but was good enough to complete the required hardware testing. He moved onto other projects while waiting for the software guys to do their job.
And so he was quite surprised when, several months later, a customer bought The Probe in bulk, and the Powers That Be demanded immediate shipment. “We don’t even have software written for it yet!” Tim protested.
“Roger told us that you wrote the software and it was all ready to go.”
“What? No!” Tim was astounded and started shaking his head. “I wrote an application to test The Probe’s hardware interface, but it’s just an internal tool. It’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered application you ever set eyes on!”
“Does it work with the hardware?” they asked.
“Well, yes…”
“Then we’ll ship it. We need this sale. It’s Antioch Industries, and once they buy it, everyone else in the industry will be falling over themselves to upgrade, too.”
Tim started to protest again, but The Powers That Be turned to the Release team. “Go on Bors,” they said, “Package a release.”
“Right! Silly little bleeder. One shipped product coming right up.”
And so, his slow, unwieldy, segfaulting GDI+ application was burned onto a CD, labeled with sharpie, and packed into a box with The Probe. The kaboodle was shipped off to Antioch, like an unholy grenade, waiting for the customer to pull the pin…
… and when it finally did go off, all Tim could say was, “I warned you, but did you listen to me? Oh no, you knew, didn’t you? Oh, it’s just a harmless little piece of software, isn’t it?”
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