Was it a Commodore PET?

No, but it had one byte too many!

I guess the mouse must have been in that corner of the screen!

Your name checks out

I guess Walt didn't have to neither cat nor tail logs to spot what was wrong

A cat of ours managed (by pure luck on its random paw interactions with the keyboard) to hit one of the ctrl alt combos to change "screen orientation" on partner laptop when it went for a keyboard walk (can't remember now if it was 90 degrees or full upside down as many, many years ago, before partner switched to Macs (that cat long deceased), but partner had no clue how to sort it out & I had to fix it for her)

> that cat long deceased

Seems a bit harsh

Unfortunate accidents with windows...

An odd thing about cats ... Their terminal velocity is not terminal.

Best one I have had is an older guy who kept asking me why his Word toolbars were constantly resetting with strange options. (Yes toolbars - before ribbons) I then visited him and while chatting over a cup of tea the cat jumped up and walked across the keyboard.

Cats are really good at pressing keyboard combos...

This is still possible in modern Word today. Only last month client phoned up to ask why her Word "looked odd". Someone (or some thing) had turned on "Immersive Reader" mode. So I asked if she had a cat.

(Edit: Was writing this the same time as Tiggity above... clearly a common issue)

...to ask why her Word "looked odd".

Nowadays, the reason is mostly because Microsoft decided to change something for the worse. Although, worse than Word is Teams. I assume, there's a special place reserved in hell for the Teams designers.

My cat whilst being a master of finding new kbd shortcuts at work , also managed at home to find "Load previous saved game" hotkey (F5) , which was quite annoying .

So she can help me work by laying on it. Sometimes gets it wrong and lays on one I am using

She is known to look at it lid down and demand it is opened so she can lay on the keys themselves

I have a cat that, in winter, has a curious propensity to find the exact moment when I'm out of my home office (filling my glass of water, or going to the toilet or whatever) to hop on the desk and lay down on the keyboard.

Which has already caused me so many problems that I now have the reflex of puling the lid down just far enough that the cat can't get in under (it hasn't yet figured out that all it has to do is push it up with its head) and yet not far enough to trigger sleep mode.

One of mine likes to sit in front of the screen to watch the mouse pointer move about - and hunts for it on the desk if I make it move to the bottom and "jump off".

My daughters rabbit got lose in the house, went behind the TV, where the CAT5 cables went, and chewed through the main feed from the telco (BT) to the router.

Common one for rabbits. 18 years ago I got a call out. A family house sitting let the rabbit run around the front room. Didn't just take out phone cable. It got ALL the cables behind the TV... Not sure how it was still alive as it also went for the power cables.

A friend of mine had a border collie puppy that they used to shut in the utility room when they went out as it was still being house trained. It was a bit cold in there in the winter, so they put an electric heater in to keep it warm.

They came back one day to find the power out. The main RCD had tripped when the puppy decided to chew through the power cable to the heater. It was totally unharmed (thank's to the RCD), but it never went near a cable again!

My shepherd dog once tasked herself with slicing a 20 meter 3-phase extension cord into much more handy 5-10 cm pieces... luckily it wasn't live (I mean the wiring, but the dog pretty much played dead when I found out)

No particular IT content but friends left their Retriever on their boat while they went to the pub. They were very fortunate to return when they did - it had chewed almost through the gas pipe that ran under the front door. A few minutes later and, if they hadn't noticed the smell of gas, they would probably have reached in and turned the lights on, then possibly boom.

My ex wife told me that the birds had pulled apart the cabling for the network. Nest building instincts.

...how it was still alive as it also went for the power cables

Was this in or near Caerbannog? Vicious beasts living there...

Wiping clove oil on the cables helped stop my mate's puppy from chewing everything in sight

They sell bitter apple spray just for this very problem.

It will stop most pets from chewing inappropriately ... but there is always the one.

Need I tell this crowd to not apply it to live wires, and wait for it to dry before plugging them back in?

We love spitzensparken und poppencorken mit blowenfusen - will apply said bitter apple spray to live wires...

Cats sit on keyboards to help their humans. Cats know they are always centre of attention, so if human has hands on a keyboard then the cat is helping human by sitting there so cat can be stroked and fussed.

A couple of yeras ago I was on a Zoom call with a consultant when he suddenly dropped off the call. We got a phonecall about 20 minutes later, he said he was rejoining the call from his wife's office upsatirs in the house because his dog had chewed through the network cable going to his office at the back of his garage. He sent us a photo of a network cable running up the outside wall of his office which had been completely chewed in half.

30 year ago we bought our mother a laptop computer. She was living on her own and starting to get confused.

She loved the fish tank screensaver, of the fish swimming around.

I visited her once, to see her with a watering can, trying to find a hole to add more water, as it was a month since she had got the screen saver, and knew you had to top up the water in fish tanks.

Yikes ! Now that is what you call a close call.

Back in my Windows 3.11 days (Windows 95 was available by then, but I hadn't taken the big step yet), one day, I was browsing the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\ (or maybe it was SYSTEM32\ ) in good ol' File Manager, as one does, with my little white cat looking on watching me work. With a mouse in motion, apparently she just couldn't take it any more, and she took a swipe at the mouse. She managed to hit my finger just right to bounce the button and move the mouse around, and suddenly, a big chunk of those SYSTEM(32) files were dropped into some other directory, I knew not where. I immediately realised that I'd have to find them and put them back where they came from before rebooting, because it was unlikely to boot successfully without those files in the right place, and before it restarted itself or shutdown, because it was Windows 3.11, whichever came first. Fortunately, I did locate where they'd been moved in time, and never had any other bad side effects of their having gone missing.

But really, going after a mouse? How stereotypical!

Used to live with two young cats and one of them took a liking to the wires running across the desk (keyboard and trackball). Eventually solved by moving to wireless peripherals (back then a very new thing), but I found that if the cable on the MS Trackball was folded back on itself at exactly the right point and pinched with a clothes peg, the internal cables would just about make contact and the device was "usable" until the replacement turned up.

Luckily the current furry resident has no interest whatsoever in wiring. (furballing onto nice clean duvet covers on the other hand....)

Dogs do unconditional love. With cats, in my experience, it is usually very conditional (on Dreamies/Temptations)