Sixty servers in a basement with its own cooling, years before anyone said cloud. You learn hardware failure in your body. You hear a drive going. You feel the room warm before the alert fires.

Brex peaked at $12.3B. Capital One is buying it for $5.15B. The product didn't collapse — the valuation just was not real at 0% rates. Founder lesson, late-stage risk checklist, and the ZIRP-era infra receipt: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/brex-fintech-reckoning/

Brex

Capital One acquires Brex for $5.15 billion, 58% below peak valuation.

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A $13B industry sells access to a QR algorithm that ships free in every language. The product is a redirect server, and when your subscription lapses, every printed flyer goes to a "subscribe to continue" page. Full piece: https://roamingpigs.com/r/qcis #qrcodes #saas

The QR Code Industry Is a $13 Billion Shakedown

The QR code generator industry charges subscription fees for an open standard that takes three lines of code to implement.

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In the 90s I ran servers from my house on two T1s. Three megabits total, four figures a month, and it felt like infinity.

I put together a starter pack of people who keep old machines running and remember how we got here. Historians, restorers, and the folks who decap chips to read microcode off the die. If you came up on hardware you could watch work, these are your people. #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing

Ran BBSs in the 80s. One phone line, one caller at a time. Everything social media rediscovered about moderation we learned on a single line, with a SysOp who had to sleep sometimes.

First C program, around 1980, on a TRS-80 using Small-C. The compiler fit in less memory than a browser tab uses now. What it taught me: a compiler is just a program someone wrote, and you can read it.

First machine I programmed had no keyboard and no screen. You entered machine code on an Altair by flipping switches, one byte at a time. Every abstraction since is someone hiding those switches. Usually a gift.

I started programming in 1979 on an Altair, entering machine code through front panel switches. No keyboard, no screen. Everything since has been a variation on the same problem: making the machine do what you meant instead of what you said. #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #programming