[p4] Mailing list question - posts seem to take longerthanexpected to show through list

[Robert Cowham]

This is actually an excellent example of agile development in some ways -
the simplest thing that could possibly work!

I remember reading (in Fast Company?) about a business that wanted to try
selling cars on the internet. The first iteration was a web form with car
info that emailed real people who did all the rest of the buying etc. Time
taken to get initial form on the net - hours or days. Once they had had a
few hits and evidence of real people/customers wanting to buy cars this way,
they started looking at developing the rest of the automated back end...

Robert
P.s. I remember compuserve, other BBs, and indeed newsgroups - my favourite
way of reading large volumes of stuff is via a newsreader as opposed to
online BBs

> -----Original Message-----
> From: perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com 
> [mailto:perforce-user-bounces at perforce.com] On Behalf Of 
> David Weintraub
> Sent: 08 November 2007 15:25
> To: Perforce Users Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [p4] Mailing list question - posts seem to take 
> longerthanexpected to show through list
> 
> Way back in the Precambrian era back when being online meant 
> having an account with CompuServe, I worked as a developer 
> for a medical billing company.  We had installed modems on 
> all of our clients because we were using Kermit to help 
> update our software and do remote maintenance (I mentioned 
> this, so you understand how long ago this was).
> 
> One of the biggest headaches for our clients was submitting 
> insurance claims. Each company had a different form, and even 
> people who worked for the same company and had the same 
> insurance may have their forms submitted to two entirely 
> different addresses. We got the idea that maybe we could 
> convince the insurers to take electronic claims submission, 
> and finally convinced one of the biggest insurers to try a 
> pilot project.
> 
> After about six months of programming and testing, we gave 
> our doctors the release and had them submit the claims. The 
> insurer was thrilled at this jet age innovation and invited 
> us down to show us their operation.
> 
> In one corner was the modem that doctors called to download 
> their patients' claims. It was attached to a reel-to-reel 
> data storage machine that recorded the claims onto a tape (It 
> was obsolete even back then) as the modem downloaded the 
> data. Every once in a while, the tape would be taken off and 
> put on a mini-computer that was attached to a printer. The 
> computer would read the reel-to-reel tape, and printed out 
> the information onto standard paper insurance forms.
> The company then took these paper forms and passed them down 
> to their data entry pool to enter them into their system.
>