Never occurred to these top guns to rename formats.com to convert.com or babel.com etc?

A bit like having a high tech artillery system's safety and integrity checking application called fire!

And never use "repeat" over the radio when talking to the "drop-shorts" who are living up to their reputation...

I once heard that on artillery test ranges, when counting down they go 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, , 4, 3, 2, 1, "fire", skipping "five" because it sounds too much like "fire"

the word "five" is also easily lost and more easily misunderstood in radio comms. Which is why in the international phonetic alphabet you give that number as "fiver"

I recommend Tim Harford's Cautionary tales on the cause of the world's worst aircraft disaster.

Hint, mix up over wording used

https://timharford.com/2025/01/cautionary-tales-cleared-for-take-off-tenerife-air-disaster-1/

After we were taken over by a much bigger concern, I was tasked with forwarding the monthly 'Management Reports' because I knew how to use Kermit...... These reports were apparently highly confidential and obviously, I could not read them because they were password-protected..... Whilst this might have been a challenge, security was rather undermined when they used the same password as the Kermit transfer-protocol....

You will have guessed this was some time ago but the password is still in my memory: 'cabinet'. Their accountant had decided this was a word he could remember. Of course all companies in the group had to use this password.

Somehow, we learned that they were considering changing our working hours to match the rest of the group; we finished early on Friday afternoon.... they wondered why the other companies started to push for similar conditions to the newcomers. It might have been mentioned in the reports.....

To be fair, I was expecting the password to be 'kermit'.

Probably Fr0g

P1ggy

So Tom was called when there was something major wrong at Ground Control?

General failure was reading his disk

Better General Failure than Corporal Punishment

Sorry, couldn't resist

Private Files, shirley?

Sorry, I couldn't either...

All is good until Colonel Panic makes an unexpected appearance.

"Off to reboor camp! Chop chop!"

So Tom was called when there was something major wrong at Ground Control?

The issue was related to compatibility between CP/M and Windows, and not between two different versions of Unix, so it wasn't a case of bashes to bashes

He shouldn't have been peeping through these files, though.

I find a bit hard to believe they put in the format command parameters when trying to convert a file, as the one mandatory parameter for format is the drive letter and filenames are not allowed... but then, people will be people, they might even have used format /? to check the correct syntax

IIRC - early versions of format (DOS1, 2) didn't need the drive letter. Entering format would just go ahead and format the default drive regardless. No questions asked. Eventually common sense prevailed at microsoft (never thought I would be saying that) and you had to specify drive letter.

A Tandy SX1000 was my first PC. Bought as a student back in 1988 (?) after I had spent the summer job working extensively with PC's and fancied one myself. I seem to recall the local Tandy were selling it cheap, last one in stock, as it was end of line. I was first one in our course to have a PC at home - helped me excel (bad pun) at computing and open up a career trajectory. I think it is still up in my loft.

I'm pretty sure everybody here has had a friend ask to have their computer fixed and you've run across swinger party photos.

or is that just me?

Or when the Windows Run dialog suggested entries from their browser history.

Working on a colleague's computer, I noticed an odd anonymously-named folder, which contained another folder, and another, and another, and eventually, many layers down, were the "Page 3" photos of another work colleague. Never mentioned it to either of them.

Finding nearly 2gb of porn in the days of dial up was the most bizarre and baffling thing I ever saw. Even told us to help ourselves to it when they dropped it off for fixing.

"or is that just me?"

It could be down to the company you keep.

Bringing flashbacks of countless students asking me he help get their homework from mangled 3.5" disks.

The cause of this was I.T lecturers telling them to store their data that way. When I quizzed them on why these so called experts were telling their pupils to store precious data solely on the single most unreliable media around (and not the it dept provided safe secure backed up network home drives ) they replied:

"its on the syllabus"

.

My poster campaign advising against this did little to stem the flow.

At uni in the 1980s we all got a floppy disk and were strictly told not to copy copyright material such as Apple Mac applications Almost immediately after was the lesson on copying files where it was suggested we copy MacWrite to floppy.

"store precious data solely on the single most unreliable media around (and not the it dept provided safe secure backed up network home drives ) "

In their place I might have decided on both. It's not unknown for an academic institution to have a loss of data. In the days of floppy-only PCs the floppy was looked on as a standard storage medium and not necessarily compared to alternatives by users except in terms of capacity.

I once did some work that involved connecting some new software to access the Police National Computer. The only test that was allowed to be run "live" when I was present was to query my own car's index number. (At least it proved I didn't own a stolen vehicle.) Though maybe auditors did get to wonder why that same query was being issued multiple times in a short period.

What about an earlier vehicle of yours you know has been scrapped?

I once worked on a visualization package for CT and MRI scans, and we tested our iso-surface rendering tool on a public, anonymized data set of a CT scan of a girls head. At the appropriate threshold level you could readily visualize the bone structure and observe a huge hole in the bone (we initially thought it was a bug in our code), where some bone-destroying bacterial infection had done its gruesome work. All well and good, but at another threshold setting, you could visualize skin and hair, showing her face clearly. Now I did not know who this person was, but we decided not to use this data set for visualization labs, on the off chance that some students might see a familiar face.

(AC for a reason)

I work in a school, I'm not tech support, but the staff often use me as first line support as I'm easier to find than the IT guy.

Sometimes people don't need real tech support, they just use me because they're too bone idle to do something themselves.

One case in point was when the Learning Support lead needed to know how much money we were given by the Government for each child with learning difficulties. This is important so we know how much money is in the budget for the department.

The problem is, we straddle two counties, and the counties have a different format for their Education & Health Care Plan (EHCP) documents, so the grant award is in a different place in the two documents, and the manager really couldn't be arsed looking through them all.

The second problem I encountered is none of the files had sensible names, so I had to open each file and skim through them all for names and grant values.

Many of the files were confidential for very good reasons.

My god, some kids have horrific home lives, I needed a good dose of mind bleach after reading that lot...

As a sysadmin at a major hospital I was responsible for the care and feeding of a PDP-11 that ran a horrendous flat-file database of text documents (histopathology and cytopathology reports) that needed a regular archiving procedure run to avoid it filling up. That archiving process had a maximum document size smaller than the primary database for some insane reason so occasionally on the larger documents it would puke and stall the entire batch. The largest documents to be found on that system were autopsy reports. When the archive job stalled, I had to identify the document responsible and manually break it into two linked documents, with the requirement that I didn't break it up in such a way that reading either half standalone could give apparently incorrect info. This was why they wanted a techie from a bioscience background, which was why I got the job.

Every document that stalled the process I had to actually read and understand before choosing where to split it.

Twice, I encountered the report on the death of somebody I knew in this process.

...you haven't worked in desktop support.

As a side note, looking after the (large) phone system at my last company, I'd set up fraud detection monitoring to look for things such as premium rate abuse (this is the days when you couldn't do a blanket ban), extended international calls and potential phreaking

One of the conference phones was making strange out of hours calls to the same number in an Asian country.

I reported it to the IT Director who looked a little flustered, then told me it was the business setting up a brand new follow the sun support centre, a highly confidential project and to drop all these numbers out of the fraud detection.