Both Tracks Moving

In 1994 I started writing a textbook called Windows 95 Essentials for an Engineer’s Toolkit. There was one problem: Windows 95 did not exist yet. Microsoft was still building it, and they pushed updates almost weekly. Each one arrived on a new set of over a dozen floppy disks. Every update meant loading those disks, reinstalling from scratch, retesting every procedure, and rewriting any section that no longer matched the software. My second daughter, Gabby was turning four years old. Eva was born in June 1995, right as the book was finishing. I kept writing.

Spring 1995 something else happened that had nothing to do with floppy disks. The internet was being privatized in real time. Through most of the early 1990s, the internet was a government and academic network. The NSFNET backbone carried U.S. research and education traffic at no cost to institutions. Commercial access was limited, and online services like CompuServe and AOL operated as walled gardens: you paid a subscription, you got their content, and the wider internet was largely off the table. Microsoft had built The Microsoft Network on exactly that model, a paid subscription service meant to compete with AOL. Then the walls started coming down. The NSFNET was decommissioned in April 1995, handing the backbone to commercial providers. Commercial ISPs multiplied. The web browser arrived. And Microsoft, watching the same thing everyone else was watching, pivoted almost overnight. Bill Gates’ “Internet Tidal Wave” memo from May 1995 called the internet “the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC.” MSN shifted toward the open web. Internet Explorer shipped with the OS. The book I was writing had to reflect a platform that was no longer just a desktop operating system; it was suddenly a node on a network becoming public infrastructure. That meant more rewrites. It also meant the book was documenting something larger than a software release.

The book took nearly a year to complete. The only way through it was parallel progress. I could not wait for the software to stabilize before writing, and I could not wait for the writing to be done before testing. Both tracks ran at the same time, and I updated whichever one had fallen behind. That is not a comfortable way to work. It is, however, the only way to finish something when the target keeps moving.

Working under moving targets is a skill. Most engineering projects involve some version of it: a component spec changes mid-build, a client requirement shifts after the design review, a test result forces a redesign two weeks before the deadline. The teams that handle this well are not the ones with the most complete plans. They are the ones who keep both tracks moving and update each one as new information arrives.

Three practical habits help. First, document as you go rather than saving it for the end; late-stage documentation of early decisions is mostly reconstruction from memory. Second, treat a changing spec as new information, not a setback; the project is not broken, it has just been updated. Third, keep the physical work and the written work in sync; a prototype that is ahead of its documentation, or documentation that describes a prototype that does not exist yet, creates debt that compounds.

The floppy disks eventually stopped coming. The book shipped. Eva was born healthy. Windows 95 launched on August 24, 1995, with a Rolling Stones song and more press coverage than any software release before it. The 31st anniversary is two months away. Not a round number, but the lessons from that year still hold: keep both tracks moving, treat every spec change as information, and do not wait for conditions to settle before making progress. The target never stops moving.