Beta driver turned heads in the hospital
- Reference: 1695972486
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/29/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kew" who told us a tale from the time he worked in tech support at a major university hospital.
"We had a large installed base of Macintosh desktops for the surgeons and staff," Kew explained – adding that this tale took place just as Apple introduced the PowerPC CPU to the Mac, meaning the tale took place in the mid-1990s.
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When Cupertino's new kit went on sale "all of the high paid doctors were clamoring for the latest and greatest for their offices."
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And were humored.
But one of the especially clever and prominent doctors wasn't happy. This medico had a Radius Pivot monitor – a then-astounding device that could rotate through 90 degrees to go from landscape to portrait mode, with the Mac re-orienting its output as the screen shifted. This doctor loved to write research papers in portrait mode and revert to landscape for other chores.
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Your correspondent recalls the Pivot and how it made working in ancient desktop publishing tool QuarkXPress rather lovely. Or as lovely as QuarkXPress could ever be.
Which is a digression for another day. Or perhaps days.
[5]How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer
[6]Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite
[7]PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin
[8]I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation
Back to Kew's story, which gets into tricky territory with his revelation that at the time the shiny new Macs arrived in his hospital, Radius was yet to port its driver to PowerPC. So the new Mac that adorned this particular doctor's desk was not fully functional!
"The monitor worked fine as a landscape-oriented monitor, but it wouldn't do its party trick, and that made the doctor very upset," Kew reported.
Kew and his colleagues let Radius know that the university they worked at was Very Important, so the monitor-maker needed to sort things out.
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Which it did, by delivering an early release driver.
"And it worked –" Kew told On Call, before adding an apologetic "sort of."
That qualification was necessary because the monitor's default setting was landscape orientation. "Every time the computer was booted up it would show the startup screen at 90° clockwise, then about halfway through booting it would load the driver and re-orient itself to portrait mode," he explained.
That regime meant that every morning Kew was treated to the sight of "A doctor powering up his computer with his head tilted on the side like a confused dog, then snapping back to vertical when the driver finished loading."
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Keep the stories coming, dear reader. We can always use more tales to consider. ®
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These days I prefer multiple side-by-side portrait windows on a pair of landscape monitors.
Yep - I do a lot of editing of publications, and it is much easier when you can see a whole page at close to full size.
In the past I used a Dell monitor that could rotate to portrait mode, and my new one also does the same. However, the new one is much larger, and I now prefer working "two up" so I can seen recto and verso at the same time (with both zoomed to about 125%) and have space for toolbars and the like.
for documentation, I tend to have two or three portrait windows open on a 4k landscape format monitor, with loads of other windows (email, browsers, etc) around the edge!
4k monitors have saved me forests of print over the last few tears.
Rotating a laptop on end does make using the keyboard rather problematic...
Only if you're daft enough to use the built-in torture device masquerading as a keyboard.
A doctor powering up his computer with his head tilted on the side like a confused dog...
That would also nicely explain the tilted computer knowledge held by these doctors: skewed beyond repair (*) .
(*) statement extrapolated from first-hand experience.
ctrl-alt-arrow and ... cats
Reminds me of the ctrl-alt-arrow trick. Since no normal user would ever contemplate rotating their laptop screen, I was, like most unaware a highly stupid key combination would do that.
And BE PERSISTENT TO REBOOTS FFS !
One day, one local cat walked on my kb and rotated it by 90 degrees.
I swear, it took me 15 mins of reboots, swearing etc ... to recover the laptop. Whoever at MS who was accomplice to this should burn forever in hell.
It seems not working any longer, though. Good riddance !
Re: ctrl-alt-arrow and ... cats
Do direct your ire appropriately - the shortcut was a quirk of the Intel graphics driver
Only 2.5 years in the NHS ....
.... but I could relate the following stories.
The doctor (surgeon) who trashed a PCMCIA card (and messed up the slot on the laptop) because he wanted to take it out and look at it. Except instead of using the eject button/switch/slidey thing, he used a set of forceps!!!! The PCMCIA card looked very foxed, and the slot in the lappy only slightly foxed.
The clinician who demanded a quad speed CDROM drive when they came out because the twin speed drive he already had wasn't fast enough. Only for the tech who visited to fit the new drive discovering that the original twin speed drive wasn't even connected to the PSU in that PC!!!!
The rollout of a large number of PCs as data gathering terminals .... which had been stacked in the office for two years because they had to be bought when the budget was available, and not when the rollout was actually going to happen. Meaning that they could have been bought for half the price if they had waited, and the machines would have been in warranty when unboxed so the usual 3-5% DOA machines could have been replaced.
45 degrees for a jolly jape
Oh the fun to be had when the graphic designer was away from their desk by turning a Radius Pivot to 45° and moving all the desktop icons to a jumble in the bottom corner as if they'd all slid down there.
Monitors need monitoring
We had a very supercilious salesman who complained his monitor was broken and he wanted a new one. Better. Now.
It was one of those monitors with the on/off switch under the screen.......
Fortunately, he didn't stay with us long.
Re: Monitors need monitoring
"Monitors need monitoring"! But who monitors the monitors of the monitors?!? Or is it monitors all the way down?
Nothing New
Back in the mid-eighties I was working at the local college (now university); PCs were starting to come in but the mainstay hardware was a Vax 11/785.
The secretarial* classroom was equipped with Facit Twist terminals which did the same as the Radius Pivot, but of course only in character mode. I don't recall what software was being used but it did take some fettling to get it to resize to the portrait mode.
*Senior Secs for Tom Sharpe fans, mostly "Daddy's got a BMW" types who's families had the money to support them through two years of college whilst ordinary people got jobs!
Landscape/portrait
We had an enterprise application based on a web browser which was designed to run full screen in landscape mode. Because it ran so slowly, I shrank it to about 3 inches wide, so I could do my day job while it was processing. Several times I entered lots of data, and assumed it was autosaved - because there was no save button. My boss came round and said there was no data.
it turns out that the save button was only displayed when window was 9 inches or wider!
I complained and got through to a developer who expressed surprise that I wasn't running landscape, and I had squashed the screen. They asked did I use the help button? This button had the same problem of not being visible. Also using the help button wiped out what you had entered.
I was asked to talk to a group of the developers ( and their manager) about the end user experience. I was allocated an hour, and we overran. I had 50+ comments, some were basic like "What does the icon of a dog mean? It has no hover text to explain". Why do you erase all of the data? Do not just truncate the screen - use scroll bars. Why is it so slow?
They suggested they could provide an education course on how to use it. I said providing this would be an admission of failure to design an intuitive system
Afterwards the managed thanked me and said it was very useful talking to a real user, rather than someone just testing the application.
The doctor was/is on to something. Coding, or any sort of word processing, is best done on a portrait monitor.
But look at us here still going around with landscape devices like utter mugs. Except, of course, for those of you who already know this and are reading this comment on a portrait monitor.