Now I understand my computer better

A programmer’s wife sends him to the grocery store with the instructions, “Get a loaf of bread, and if they have eggs, get a dozen.” He comes home with a dozen loaves of bread and tells her, “they had eggs.”

TFF Lady O.  

Lol makes perfect sense to me.   He was even kind enough to tell his wife that the store had eggs. She should have already known that by look at his output...

Excellent point, tictoc.

Tech support: What kind of computer do you have?
Customer: A white one...
Tech support: Click on the 'my computer' icon on to the left of the screen.
Customer: Your left or my left?
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Customer: Hi, good afternoon, this is Martha, I can't print. Every time I try, it says 'Can't find printer'. I've even lifted the printer and placed it in front of the monitor, but the computer still says he can't find it..
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Tech support: What's on your monitor now, ma'am?
Customer: A teddy bear my boyfriend bought for me.
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Customer: My keyboard is not working anymore.
Tech support: Are you sure it's plugged into the computer?
Customer: No. I can't get behind the computer.
Tech support: Pick up your keyboard and walk 10 paces back.
Customer: OK
Tech support: Did the keyboard come with you?
Customer: Yes
Tech support: That means the keyboard is not plugged in.
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Customer: I can't get on the Internet.
Tech support: Are you sure you used the right password?
Customer: Yes, I'm sure. I saw my colleague do it.
Tech support: Can you tell me what the password was?
Customer: Five dots.
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Tech support: What anti-virus program do you use?
Customer: Netscape.
Tech support: That's not an anti-virus program.
Customer: Oh, sorry... Internet Explorer..
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Customer: I have a huge problem. A friend has placed a screen saver on my computer, but every time I move the mouse, it disappears.
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Tech support: How may I help you?
Customer: I'm writing my first email.
Tech support: OK, and what seems to be the problem?
Customer: Well, I have the letter 'a' in the address, but how do I get the little circle around it?
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A woman customer called the Canon help desk with a problem with her printer.
Tech support: Are you running it under windows?
Customer: 'No, my desk is next to the door, but that is a good point. The man sitting in the cubicle next to me is under a window, and his printer is working fine.'
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Tech support: 'Okay Bob, let's press the control and escape keys at the same time. That brings up a task list in the middle of the screen. Now type the letter 'P'
to bring up the Program Manager.'
Customer: I don't have a P.
Tech support: On your keyboard, Bob.
Customer: What do you mean?
Tech support: 'P'.....on your keyboard, Bob.
Customer: I'M NOT GOING TO DO THAT!

Back when computers were expensive we had a customer who had a boot disk (remember floppies) which kept going bad. We had engineers talking to her and over and over the same thing happened. Finally two of us flew to her house (yes we did that in those days) and handed
her a brand new floppy and asked her to do what she does.  She brought the machine up perfectly and pulled out the boot floppy and put it on the side of her metal file cabinet with a magnet.  She put the magnet right on the spot of the floppy that had the no magnets sign on
it.  I would guess we spent 20K USD on her on way or another.  It taught us that anything can happen when it comes to people.  She was a very bright person just didn't know about magnets and floppies.

Z

Thanks for the flash from the past, Zed. I had forgotten about floppies. It is difficult to believe how far technology has come in less than a human life time. This morning I woke up, reached out for my iPad lying beside me on the bed (next to the cat) and checked email before even getting up. My first home computer was a KayPro with WordStar. It was big, ugly and made me crazy!

Lady Otter Latté wrote:Thanks for the flash from the past, Zed. I had forgotten about floppies. It is difficult to believe how far technology has come in less than a human life time. This morning I woke up, reached out for my iPad lying beside me on the bed (next to the cat) and checked email before even getting up. My first home computer was a KayPro with WordStar. It was big, ugly and made me crazy!

 

Oh gawd.  I worked in a Kaypro vendor's for a season.  They rented a lot of them to students at the local U.  What a piece of $#%&&*.

And while trotting down Memory Lane.....does anyone remember that simple, sweet Word Processor called "Spellbinder" that practically anyone could use?  As I'm tearing my hair out trying to make the latest version of Word bring me handy clues on completing a project, I MISS the older word processors.  I don't need something that does EVERYTHING.  (Cuss, slam, crash).
 

One word. Hollerith!   

We used KayPros for programming EPROMs with machine language .... so they could become controllers robots or motor control. Can't imagine using them otherwise

sparks wrote:We used KayPros for programming EPROMs with machine language .... so they could become controllers robots or motor control.  Can't imagine using them otherwise

Imagine it. Dozens of students, paying a few peanuts to rent them and trying their little hearts out to actually USE them.

How about another blast from the past: CROMEMCO !

Not as old as most here but my first programming class was on an apple II E. Ugh run and brun commands... I remember taking a hole punch and making "one sided" floppy's into "two sided" by "notching" the other side. Easy way to save $$$ lol.

Didn't Kaypro run the CP/M operating system on the Z80 chip?

When we first started using computers to automate equipment, we would write the manuals then find the dumbest person in the plant and see if they could run the machine.

We found out that other companies could find dumber people than we could.........

CHILLIN wrote:Didn't Kaypro run the CP/M operating system on the Z80 chip?

CP/M was the standard OS but not the only. Same way both Linux and DOS can run on Intel PC's

You guys are funny. Z80 CPM awww that is the new stuff!  We use to wire up our programs on boards plug the board into the computer and let the card sorters run! Whole machine had 4k or something like that.  Most old accounting computers were really fancy sorting machines. We had hydraulic printers with the letters on chains that would spin around and make a heck of a noise. The first Winchester pack hard drive we got held some small amount of memory compared to today and was the size of a toaster oven but it was removable. One use to swap packs out to run programs also. Disk drive that held these packs were the size of a small washer and would dim the lights when spinning up.  Oh yea the computers I use to use used mag core memory and were water cooled complete with a drain in the bottom of the computer. The space shuttle used this type of memory with its multiple IBM computers.


My youth!



Z

Ah, the bad old days of computing. I can relate to all those stories. I was until two years ago, a software developer. In the early days I saw a lot of those tech support issues. Like the HR manager whose floppy would miraculously go bad every other day. Turns out she was putting it in her purse, which had a magnetic fastener. Or the dimwit, that when told to take the diskette out of the jacket, actually took some scissors to extract the magnetic disk itself!

Things were, in a way, more simple then. But our challenge was trying to push the envelope and find a way for the machines to do things like 3D graphics with some very primitive hardware.

Pete

As a user, I kind of liked the old "experimental pre-windows days".......  

Many years running DOS on a BBS. Even early MS Office was all text based and ran from a floppy. WIN 95 was just DOS with a pretty face.

First graphic Windows I saw was WIN-286 in Black and White but developed to run on 286 and 386 machines. Looked just like the first Windows