That takes me back very nearly 40 years - we used those for our "Small Systems" course at uni, which was effectively assembly level programming.

I never even knew there was such a thing as a hard-sector discs.

And I've been using floppies since the IBM PC with double 360kb 5¼" floppies.

Salute to the master.

I started off with 8”, hard sectored, single sided disks and mag-stripe printer cards.

Graduated to soft-sector. Then 5 ¼ “... and so on.

Was a user bashing the keyboard and screaming at the PC "why aren't you working"?

I went over and swapped the keyboard (without unplugging) with the one on the adjacent desk - cleaners had been in...

I started around ten years ago at a big IT company. It was quite a jovial office, with lots of pranks. For over a year, one of my colleagues complained that his mouse would occasionally move erratically across the screen. His machine was re-imaged and eventually, IMMSMC, replaced, but the issue still happened. One of the japesters had plugged another mouse into his docking station, which was never inspected, and said mouse would occasionally be moved....

Felt sorry for the poor chap... He was so good about it though...

A few years back in a large open plan office there were a number of support teams dotted around the place. One team always had their team meeting on a Friday afternoon. One week I went over and put a small piece of Sellotape across the optical sensors on our their mice.

Que lots of rebooting when they came back as most of them thought their machines had hung.

Took a few minutes for someone to work out it was Sellotape. And for some reason everyone looked in my direction...

Ah, that one's still a goodie.

I did it a few years ago to one of our HoDs. After she dragged me into her office, saying that her email wasn't working, it really needed to be working etc... etc... Turned out that it was a new machine and Outlook hadn't been pinned to the task bar. She didn't know how to open it any other way.

In the circumstance, I feel that mucking with her mouse was entirely justified.

his mouse would occasionally move erratically across the screen

A couple of roles ago we had a sister company that tended to go their own way. Amongst his other IT purchases*, without asking, the MD bought two identical wireless mice for himself and his finance guy.

He then complained of erratic mouse movements which we "must sort out". You can probably see where this is going! Their desks were effectively back-to-back, separated by a thin partition wall, and in those days wireless mice (mouses, meeses?) were single channel with no encoding so when the finance person moved his mouse there was just enough signal to cause erratic movement in the MD's mouse.

*His other one was to buy a Sony Vaio laptop from Dixons without asking. 13 months later we had to scrap it due to driver issues. Dixons weren't interested as it was out of warranty, Sony UK reckoned it was a parts bin special direct from Sony Japan so nothing to do with them,

Ah, the joys of cleaners moving or unplugging things. At one job I used to leave my memory deficient Sun workstation compiling overnight, and often found it had been brutally turned off by the cleaner yanking the plug out to use the socket for their vacuum cleaner. The cleaner only spoke Spanish, and this being before Google Translate or similar, I had to ask a Spanish speaking friend to help me write a polite sign that I put above the plug sockets. The sign suggested they use the sockets at the other end of the room. The sockets that our hated manager had his PC plugged into...

Well, there's your problem.... Jamie Hyneman anyone?

C4

Ah, the joy of the diskette. Figuring out which manufacturer's media worked most reliably in which manufacturer's drives. Explaining to users why diskettes shouldn't be used as coffee cup mats. Carefully extracting the (usually 5.25") diskette from its jacket, rinsing it under a tap, drying off and replacing the diskette in the jacket of another sacrificial one, because the user (accountant's secretary) ignored the bit about cup mats. Explaining to a customer who was having trouble with reading diskettes that folding them in 4 to fit your shirt pocket really isn't a good idea. Turning single-sided diskettes in to dodgy double-sided by cutting the notch on the other edge of the jacket (it was an emergency, game state needed saving). Trying to get some sort of recognisable tune out of ACT Sirius (Victor 9000) diskette drives - which had variable speed zones across the disk. Attaching 8" drives ("Big D", I think?) to PCs for data transfer (EBCDIC to ASCII, anybody?).

Them were the days :-)

I remember how amazingly fast discs seemed compared to loading from tape on the BBC Micros at school.

Greybeard -->

You missed diskettes stapled into reports, and sticking the floppy to a filing cabinet with a fridge magnet.

Many many years ago, we had a mix of 3.5 inch HD and DD floppies at our place. We also had a number if IBM PS/2's that were quite lax at checking what type of floppy disk was in the drive and would happily format DD disks (720KB) to HD capacity (1.44MB). Given that the DD media was manufactured as HD but failed to make the grade, this was mostly fine. Until of course the incorrectly formatted disk was taken to a machine that did check the disk type properly....

I still have an 8" hard sectored floppy knocking about somewhere, with a collection of documents I wrote on a Philips WP system in the mid 80s. I wonder if anyone, anywhere can still read that?