Still shudder when I see WP formatting codes

Always found it useful tool myself. It was also great for showing out WP really jumped the shark when Corel introduced that awful shadow cursor thing and could see all the codes inserted simply to save having to set the margins yourself. At least you could turn it off.

WP 5.1 was perfect for typists. Everything was keyboard controlled, so there was no back and forth between mouse and keyboard like today. And this was an age where the Typing Pool was still a thing in many companies.

I was always a little bit in awe with how fast they could get words onto a page.

I totally agree. There are so many apps around now which force you to use the mouse when a simple hot-key would work just as well.

Also I am pretty sure that RSI didn't exist until the mouse was invented. The shape of mice (even so called ergonomic ones) is not conducive to making hand movements consistent with human skeletal structure.

it might also have been that the people whose jobs involved lots of typing were more likely then to have actually trained as typists, and therefore avoided RSI through better technique. (eg: the tops of your hands should be level, so you can balance coins on them, and your wrists not resting on anything.) Also this was literally the era of the IBM mechanical keyboards, when IBM model Ms were new and had competitors.

I was a young coder at the civil service at the time and I was warned not to make it too obvious I could touch-type as a: I'd be given more of that kind of work and b: the secretaries wouldn't like it. hell with that. hell with those days.

And a live DJ in the queue, playing music and interviewing WP employees, better than the montone music loops and pre-recorded voiceovers today.

One interview was so good, and funny, I actually asked the operator to put me back in the queue, so I could hear the end of it!

At least you could see those formatting codes and removing problematic ones.

Same issue(Ish) for my dear departed father.... He had suffered a stroke and was trying to use his PC in his nursing home. He rang in a rage becasue "the bloody computer" wasn't switching on.

Whilst he was on the phone I could hear the dulcet chime of the BIOS signalling a problem. I casually asked what, other than his fingers, was on the keyboard... cue shuffling noises as his heap "filing system" was shoved out of the way.

Yup an 11th finger, holding down the enter key and causing the BIOS to think there was a keyboard fault (rather than PEBUK, which to be fair to keyboards and PCs everywhere, is almost impossible for the hardware to detect)

That BIOS beep saved a 100 mile round trip.

"his heap "filing system""

That's pronounced "piling system".

A round in memory of dear departed dads everywhere.

Young uns will not know what BIOS beep codes are.

Great for diagnosis especially when nothing will show on the screen.

My late father would allow anyone to install anything on his work computer.... leading to me having to diagnose problem from faxed printouts of config.sys and autoexec.bat

Ah the days of malware only arriving on a floppy disc.

Being in a pub and getting a panicked technical support call as their team had run out of ideas. Trying to visualise the screen they're on and the system involved from memory whilst slightly sloshed (I wasn't technically on call, honest). Too many times to count. As an aside - why do all these calls seem to start with "Sorry to bother you, but..."?

At about the same time we had a student doing work experience at the company I then worked for. She spent all day typing up a long document then exited without saving it. Cue many tears, wailing, etc. and a "Can't you do anything?"

This was long before any form of autosave or document recovery of course, and nobody had suggested saving her work as she went along, so she was faced with the prospect of retyping it all.

Norton to the rescue! With only a 10MB HD to worry about I was able to find the first sector of the temporary file on the disk and update the start position on the "deleted" FAT record and rename the file. She at least then had most of the raw text with a few spurious characters added, an hour or so saw it all corrected and reformatted.

I've mentioned this before, had an upset user phone in frantically, her documents were filling up with strange things when she typed, I visited and immediately saw the binder on the keyboard... D'oh!

This is more of a who-me but ...

Come my final year and dissertation time had come round. I was one of the few with a computer - an Atari ST for the nostalgic. I had completed my dissertation and the lady with whom I was in lust with needed to type hers up so I lent her my shiny tech toy.

All went well till she was just about to finish and I get a visit to say that it won't save. I got annoyed and guessed that her floppy had got corrupted. I snatched the next floppy and saved dissert.doc. as it was saving I realised with horror that I was just in the process of overwriting my own dissertation with hers. Lots of swearing and panicked bowel lossening pondering on how long an extension I could get till I remembered that the WP software saved a .bak on each disk as well. Sure enough, I opened up the .bak file and mine was there. I hastily saved it to another disk and we plugged in my dot matrix printer to have our eardrums bored out with ages of screaming.

The lust bit never came to anything though which might be just was well.

Who cares about the lust bit of your story?

This is an IT forum - allegedly. What printer drivers and fonts were used? Who made the floppies?

While the head of IT for a broadcast marketing agency in London I was walking through the office one day and noticed a strange sight (well stranger than normal in that environment at least)... I saw a monitor stand pointing upwards, its flat base standing proud above the monitor which was resting on its top frame on the desk, wedged with an assorted group of things from phone books and pens to ensure that the screen would not topple.

The display on the screen however was not inverted in the same way and I went to investigate a little further. Asking the user why she had decided to put the monitor upside down, she excitedly explained that the display had suddenly flipped upside down and as she had a deadline to meet that she hadn't wanted to reach out to my team to get the issue resolved and had resorted to turning the screen upside down...

When asked what she had been doing when the display flipped, she of course said that she had just been typing and nothing strange had happened... except a folder falling over and landing on the keyboard.

Yes somehow the folder landing on the keyboard had hit the magic keystroke combination which existed on that system which inverted the display (Ctrl+Alt+Up Arrow)

Cue much laughter when I hit the key combination and the display flipped back to normal and I asked her to put her monitor back how it should be...

Suffice to say some of the more switched on users in the office did take to using the key combo on some of the new staff as a prank for some time before we decided to block it... but it did provide some merriment!

Was nothing but a glint in Vint Cerf's mind.

Debugging by phone still happens. Not all your family members have TeamViewer installed (even today, not everyone in your family is using Zoom), and as for asking them to configure a Windows Remote Connection, forget about it.

And it's always urgent, isn't it ?

"And it's always urgent, isn't it ?"

Indeed... a panic call from my Ex at 11.30pm as she needed to print something urgently for the next morning for our daughters school... after a few minutes of troubleshooting, told her to turn off the printer and wait, a few minutes later told her to switch it back on and lo and behold the printer sprang to life spewing out the multiple copies of the document which she had sent to the printer...

I should have started with the old faithful "Have you tired turning it off and on again?" right at the start... after 18 years together I thought she would have learned that... but apparently not.

We had remote connectivity before Cerf got involved. DOS came much later.

A timely one, I was working for a company that "printed the world's money", literally.

One of their clients, the director of a Russian bank, phoned up in a panic, his daughter was studying at Oxford and had to hand her dissertation in that day, but the computer had corrupted the hard drive! (We had supplied her with an old Olivetti PC as a favour, this was early 90s.)

The PC was couriered over to us and I had to spend the afternoon trying to recover the document. I managed to get most of it back, but there was a lot of "noise" in the document, queue hours going through the whole document, word for word, replacing hieroglyphics with real text. I also added some formatting and corrected spelling and altered a few sentences to make sense.

We printed and bound the document and got it couriered back to her an hour before her deadline.

I was promised a bottle of vodka, but it never turned up...

On another occasion, I was working for an oil company just outside London. A user called up, her Mac had frozen, mouse didn't move and it didn't respond to keypresses. I gave her the bad news and told her, she'd have to reset the Mac. She didn't like that. I told her, there was nothing we could do. An hour later, she called again, asking why I hadn't visited her... So, of I trot, over to her desk (in another building), waggle the mouse, nothing, mouse pointer didn't move. Usual keypresses, nothing, totally frozen! I reached around the back and turned it off, counted to 10, turned it back on and ensured it booted cleanly.

By the time I got back to my desk, there was a complaint filed against me, because I had taken so long to get to her, then all I had done was turn it off and on again - which I had told her to do on the phone. Luckily, it was only a short term contract and the helpdesk manager took my side, so no real fallout.

Funnily enough, the same happened to me this week.

For the 20+ times in the day, my cat jumped on my knees for some attention, then proceeded the usual dance of "step on the table, scratch himself on the corner of my laptop, move on the table", rinse and repeat.

Except this time, he stepped on a numerical key and managed to insert 50 '0' in lieu of a complex formula in the very complex excel sheet.

Grrrr. Fortunately, there is Ctrl-z :)

I've seen something like this multiple times, but it's usually about a physical folder resting on the space bar. The user would then call about how the pages kept scrolling down.

My wife still jokes about when her father, a mainframe sysop, got his first PC for home use and called her for help - he had gotten to the end of the page he was writing in the WYSIWYG text editor (Word? WordPerfect?) and needed help on how to add a new page - he was looking at it as it was just a fancy typewriter :)