If the famous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ would still be working, it would have been great to use the "click here" link for a rickroll.

Reminds me of a tour I once gave a group of international students in our HPC centre. One of the main machine was a Cray J932, which was quite an impressive box, with a huge rectangular green power LED and below it, well recessed, a reboot or power button (I forget which). One of the students asked what would happen if he pressed that button, whereupon I stated that a little metal claw would come out and snip the offending finger off. I added that if it didn't, I would get a pair of pliers and do it myself

Very nearly 40 years ago, in my first role as a Civil Servant, we'd just got our first DEC LN03 laser printer and, for a project I was working on, I had the department's only DEC Rainbow so I had access to rudimentary word processing.

Great, I could type my own letters, formatted as I wanted them, print them out then, thanks to the rules of the time, send them to the typing pool to be retyped on their IBM golfballs! Invariably there'd be one or two mistakes when they came back but that was considered acceptable at the time.

I remember the steno- & dicto-typists moving from IBM golf balls to PCs pretty much effortlessly. The speed they could type was phenomenal. The software (WordStar later WordPerfect) didn't faze them at all. Flakey floppy disks 8"&5¼" and printers especially those lacking A4 support were the two that gave them most grief.

"Promotion" from the shop floor was usual back then when computers were first introduced. I recall a young bloke just started working as an apprentice storeman when the company installed a minicomputer based warehousing system and called from the corps of storeman for volunteers to be trained to look after the system. Needless to say the lad was the only taker and for his sins a long career in IT followed.

I remember the chaos when Windows first reached those same typists and they had to move away from the DOS-based Word Perfect. Without exception they all hit the keyboard buffer limit when they started typing and it was such an impediment they were all allowed to go back to DOS systems.

Windows - downgrading performance since Day 1

I suggested to many companies that they should not 'upgrade' from DOS-Word Perfect to early Windows. But, it was the new "Kool Aid" and many moved over.

It was when I first started using the phrase "This was identified early on in your project as a likely outcome."

As "I told you f**king so!" is not so politically acceptable.

There's a reason experienced typists handled early versions of wordstar and wordperfect so seamlessly.. The workflow was set up to mimic that of a typewriter. You'd set up all your document formatting before you started typing. with the settings all named the same as typists were familiar with. This design choice was why many typists stuck with wordperfect even when wordfperect was behind the curve and very late to the WYSIWYG party. Even after WP ended up with WYSIWYG (in version 4, I think it was?) you could still use that same workflow with the same keyboard shortcuts to access it while Word made this "typist's workflow" not impossible but harder to access.

True WYSIWYG was introduced in WordPerfect 6 when they gave the option of a full graphical screen in their MSDOS version (which IIRC was a bit slow) as well as the traditional blue text screen.

I think it was WordPerfect 5 or 5.1 that introduced a graphical print preview, although editing was purely text screen.

Roy Trenneman would be proud ...

I was asked to go and investigate a control issue at a modern utility, installed in the middle of nowhere. Our mechanical-installation guys were still on site but the customer had insisted on 'Someone from the Office' to resolve the problem. It was clearly an issue of different sensor-inputs not being compatible with the control philosophy and I went with some trepidation as it was a complex arrangement to isolate and fix the fault whilst keeping the machinery operating.

On arrival at site, I had a cup of tea with our site guys and outlined the problem as I understood it. Two of us went over to the operating room to review the equipment and before I knew it, Keith had opened up the control screen, tapped in a few instructions and said "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients." I left site a few minutes later.

I made sure we employed Keith on a full-time basis. A few years later he left us and now runs his own business.

He probably could have said, "I think we should reverse the polarity of the neutron flow" and I bet no one would have been any the wiser!

The real trick is knowing which box to point at when referring to the Klystron Generator.

Well done to Walter.

I know that you don't, in general, 'reboot' mainframes BUT you also should not 'ambush' someone with limited knowledge & skills.

The fact that he could access the mainframe and reboot it so easily points to the company having little knowledge themselves.

Sometimes the blind leading the blind works !!!

Hope that was 'Walters' first step to a career in IT.

:)

My school was one of those lucky enough to get a full classroom of BBC Model B computers, each supplied with a Cub colour monitor, we also had a Ceefax decoder for downloading software from Ceefax!

The room next to ours was used by the secretarial class, the girls (Trump would love our school, only boys were allowed in the computer room, only girls in the typing room) in there were armed with IBM golfball typewriters.

Naturally, the spirit of competition soon emerged, and we set up races where the 30 boys tried to type a passage in Wordstar quicker than the girls could type it.

We lost, every single time.

The only thing we ever won was the noise level of our Alphacom golf ball printer, it was way, way louder than their typewriters...

Reminds me of when the guy who built our in-house project management PERT system left and the boss was casting around for someone who could take over looking after it. I joking commented that I had recently seen an Open University programme on the BBC2 about PERT and BANG! I got landed with the job - accidentally dropping the huge stack of punch cards that defined a project was the least of my worries.

I was working at a company in Ipswich who had just got PCs (I was netwkring them). One secretary was using Wordstar but didn't really understand about files or anything. So, anything new, she tacked onto the top of the previous letters and then just printed the first 'x' pages to produce the document in question.

Of course, the file got humumgous and I had the task of explaining that she really needed to create new documents. Not sure it worked but we did have some nice evenings/nights out together