Compression? What is that? And why is the network so slow? • The Register

Who I? There’s nothing like a bit of schadenfreude to ease the pain of getting back into the work week, and here’s why The reg begins every Monday morning with an episode of Who, Me? in which readers tell stories about how tech support didn’t go well. Hopefully this makes you feel better.

This week’s real hero is a guy we’ll rename as “Vivian,” who worked as a personal assistant to the general manager of a regional office for a hardware manufacturer.

Viv shared his office with around 300 employees. Most of the PCs in the place were 486 PCs running either Windows for Workgroups or, for the lucky few, Windows NT. They were all connected at the breakneck speed of 10 megabits per second, which was actually quite fast for the time.

Crucial to the story was that Internet access for the office relied on a Unix box connected to the mail server in the main office on the coast. All company mail for all offices went through the server in the main office – a classic bottleneck if ever there was one.

One of the tasks that landed on Viv’s desk was to help organize an office move and conduct an employee survey to give workers an opinion on the company’s next home

Viv decided that the employees deserved to see the options that management had chosen, so in the spirit of “we’re all one big family here,” he took photos with a mid-90s digital camera of three potential new locations and added them to an email to all employees and clicked “Send”.

When recipients received the email, they tried to open the images and all hell broke loose.

Or more specifically, when all hell came to a standstill because all that email and the strain it placed on the network was causing every computer to freeze.

When the IT person was called, he discovered that the problem was that these photos were in .BMP format – a file format that to this day lacks compression. JPEGs were a thing back then, but obviously a fairly new thing, and Viv wanted every single employee to be able to enjoy the images in all their great mid-90s uncompressed pixelated glory.

Each image was over three megabytes in size, so the email weighed a whopping 10 MB. Even today, if you send this to all your employees, you will be severely criticized. So you can imagine how Viv’s superiors felt.

The IT guy sorted through the stuck servers – both because the main office mail server wasn’t happy with the traffic either – and resent the images as much smaller JPEGs.

Tragically, our correspondent could not remember whether any of the offices whose image brought down the company were ultimately chosen as the new location. We suspect they would have been at a disadvantage in the vote.

Have you ever found that your enthusiasm for a project exceeds the capabilities of the technology – or your knowledge of how it works? Click here to email Who, Me? to send. and tell us the story. We may share it on a future Monday to remind other readers that we all make mistakes sometimes – so it’s okay. ®