In the year 2000, a song took half an hour to download. If anything moved, you started again. Twenty-six years later, I lost a whole night to the same problem.
Around 2000, getting a song you liked was a job in itself.
With a dial-up modem, one track could take half an hour. Half an hour of that screech, then a progress bar crawling across the screen. And you couldn't leave it. If someone in the house picked up the phone, the line dropped. If the computer decided you'd gone and switched itself off to sleep, the line dropped. Either way, you started again from zero.
Before that, it was the radio. You sat next to it with a blank cassette and your finger on the record button, waiting for the presenter to play the song. You didn't listen to the music you loved. You guarded it.
That was the deal back then. If you wanted something to finish, you had to sit next to the machine and watch it finish.
Twenty-six years later, the internet is more than a thousand times faster. A song arrives before you've finished clicking. So you'd think the deal had changed.
A few weeks ago I wrote a script to search through a large amount of data. The kind of job that takes hours and needs nobody. I started it in the evening, checked it was running, and went to bed. The whole point was simple: the computer works while I sleep, and in the morning the results are waiting.
In the morning, the results weren't waiting.
The script had run for about thirty minutes. Then the laptop decided nobody was using it and went into standby. No error, no warning. It just stopped, and stayed stopped, quietly, all night.
I restarted it in the morning and sat there while it did the work it should have done overnight. Six hours, gone. Not because the job was hard. Because a power setting thought it knew better.
Twenty-six years, a thousand times the speed, and I was back to guarding the machine like I guarded the radio.
Here's what struck me. It's not a new problem, and it's not a rare one. Anyone who has ever left a long download, a backup, a render, an upload or a report running overnight has woken up to find it stopped halfway. Everyone has lost a night like that. And almost everyone shrugs, starts it again, and loses the morning too.
Windows does let you stop it. The setting exists. It's three menus deep, and it's permanent: you switch sleep off, run the job, and then have to remember to switch it back on, or your laptop never sleeps again and the battery pays for it. So most people don't bother. They take the risk, and every so often the risk takes a night from them.
In a business, that night has a price. A report that was supposed to be ready for a nine o'clock meeting. A backup that never finished, discovered the day you need it. Someone sitting in front of a progress bar for a morning, paid by the hour, because the machine didn't do its job overnight.
The fix isn't to sit next to the computer. We stopped sitting next to the radio a long time ago.
The fix is to tell the computer, once, how long it needs to stay awake, and let it go back to normal when it's done.
A machine that works while you sleep is only useful if it doesn't fall asleep first.