Paul Everitt cleans his office and finds this gem: Principia 1.5 on a Floppy. Principia was Zope before it was Zope.
I don't even have a floppy drive, so I can't tell exactly what's on it. It's crazy to think, though, that someone could make an application server that would fit in 1.44 Mb. With an object database.Indeed. In fact, I seem to remember jokes around the office that the installation was too small to actually be taken seriously. Yet we did some very serious applications on that sucker.
Holidays are obviously a time of reflection and excessive sentimentality. It's fun to think back on where our office was then, the people that were there, and the absolute, utter lack of realization for what was to happen in the next few years.It was a very fun time and I find myself missing it off and on. The people, the old Princess Anne street building, the sounds of "Hey buddy?!" "Yeah buddy?!" going back and forth between the offices of Jim Fulton and Paul, or suddenly hearing Jim sing out "Superuser!"
This also means that I've been working on Zope/Principia for over seven years now. And working with Bobo / BoboPOS (now Zope's ZPublisher and ZODB, respectively) for nearly eight. Wow. I imagine only Rob, Paul, Jim, Brian, and a very small handful of people (many of whom ended up working with/for DC/ZC) have been using them consistently for longer than I have. I remember the day I first really used Bobo to port a Python application I had written to the web. I was able to do it in a day, and half of that was spent making really pretty templates. I was amazed and felt almost guilty.