The History of How We Came to Be
summary
Argues that engineering and operations split through three concrete forces: wartime staffing shifts that pushed women out of undifferentiated machine roles, commercial pressure to run expensive mainframes 24/7 that creates night-shift keypunch operator vs computer operator divisions, and rising technical complexity that produces layered jobs and formal job definitions (see 1968 international standards). Traces examples from ENIAC/Colossus-era machine tending to the emergence of sysadmin, notes AWS S3 2006 as a pivot toward re‑unifying roles under SRE.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:38What is SREcon
- 2:10Full Stack
- 4:25Questions
- 5:00Early Computing
- 8:27Commercial Deployment
- 12:01mainframes
- 13:58further differentiation
- 16:45why the split
- 19:24reaction to complexity
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