• DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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    7 days ago

    I had a buddy who claimed his uncle worked at Microsoft. His uncle had given him the new Windows version called “Chicago” and I was all like “That name ain’t Windows 4.0, gettouttahere!”

    Turns out he did have an uncle who worked at Microsoft who fed him beta versions of W95 to get an idiot’s point of view. I doubt that shit would fly today, preview versions would be leaked like military secrets on the Warthunder forums!

    So when another buddy claimed he had an uncle who worked at Nintendo…

  • Thorry@feddit.org
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    7 days ago

    I was there Gandalf, three thousand year ago when we invented write cache and the strength of men failed. After that we needed to ask the computer for permission to turn it off, instead of just killing it like we are supposed to.

    Although I was old enough to have had spinning rust hard drives that didn’t park their heads automatically when losing power. You would have to issue a park command manually to get the drive to park the heads. That way when the computer was sitting there powered off, the heads would be secure and not at risk of damaging themselves or the platter when the power resumed and the disk spun up again. The risk was minimal, but with prices the way they were back then, we always took care to park the heads. And when auto parking was a thing, it was such muscle memory, it took a long time to unlearn.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Right with ya! My gf and I went to the library to load up on utilities. Disk park, zip program, etc.

      One time the CMOS battery died and wiped the BIOS. We found a local IBM engineering office, not for the public, and begged a guy to copy the BIOS to a 3.5". He acted like Neo, all secretive, “If you get caught with this…” “We know, didn’t get it from you.” Weird.

  • syaochan@feddit.it
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    7 days ago

    Trivia moment: in italian the message was “È ora possibile spegnere il computer” and thanks to the fact “ora” means both hour and now, many people read it as “È ora di spegnere il computer” (It’s time to shutdown your computer)

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    7 days ago

    To this day, I have the habit of never turning it off with the power button. I was told off for doing it when I was younger despite the computers being xp and perfectly fine to turn off with a power button

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      XP was still a little twitchy about a hard power-off. I risked it as little as possible. Windows didn’t self repair nearly as well as it does now, registry would corrupt. Still, not like its predecessors!

      • Flax@feddit.uk
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        7 days ago

        At this point it wasn’t a hard power off, unless you held it. Just a software button

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I miss having a “fuck you die” switch. As an old supervisor used to say,“Fuck me? No no no no fuck YOOOOU!”