Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes We take a trip back in time to the era of floppy disks and cabinets of PDP-11 hardware for an On Call where knowing the difference between hard and soft makes all the difference. Our tale comes from a reader Regomised as "Don" who describes himself as "an electrical engineer with credentials dating back to HP 2114 16-bit …
LOL, this is a great story for on-call ... it reminds me that I still have a "desktop" PDP11/23 ... it sat on the "desktop" and I put the VT100 screen on top of it and the keyboard in front. Yes, I did see this hard-sector vs soft-sector issue very occasionally back then but something that on-call always teaches is that "problems" always result in everyone learning.
"They looked at me like I was welcome to leave immediately... I said my farewell and moved on."
Must be a British thing.
The response that they were pissed at the messenger.
These days I have to travel to one of our UK facilities that makes high-tech components about twice a year. Why my company keeps it open I have no idea, since it's a black hole when it comes to losses. But anytime someone solves one of their problems even if it's one of their internal teams, the hostility generated by the old guard is amazing. You often get the "I've been doing this job for 30 years and no one can tell me how to do it better." Reminds me of all of the "big fish in a small pond" petty intrigue by the staff in Downton Abbey
They take the problem solving as you were trying to make them look bad. They don't seem to get that they already look bad because their yield consistently is 30%, and only fluctuates to decent territory every once in a while, so screams lack of process control.
The C-suits just shut down one UK facility due to this lack of willingness to improve. I can only hope they shut down the other so I don't have to go there anymore.
My father-in-law designed and built the optical tape readers for Colossus (and built and debugged most of the rest of the hardware). When they were trying to see how fast the readers could go he pushed the tape speed up *way* beyond the normal speed, IIRC he got it up to about 80mph before the inevitable happened. They were picking bits of confetti out of everything in the room -- including the Colossus racks -- for several days...
"Most tape equipment drove the tape via the sprocket holes. Colossus didn't, it drove it via a roller mechanism & just used the sprocket holes for timing."
The LGP-30 high-speed paper tape reader also used a roller mechanism. The tape reader had to be able to stop on a character (stop code) so reading a tape was a little "jerky."
We had a problem with one paper tape that someone had spliced with scotch tape assuming that the light would go through the holes.
One of the popular design of high speed paper tape readers was based on a design from Cambridge University. I think it was originally an EDSAC II peripheral. It uses a continuously rotating capstan above the tape, a free clutch roller under the tape, and a brake pad to stop the tape on a single character even when going at full speed. The clutch and brake are both operated by solenoids. The maximum speeds were 250/500/1000 cps. The 250 cps versions didn't have a brake and relied on tape friction to stop the tape.
Anyway, the design was licensed to Elliotts, and it appeared on their own 800s/900s/500s/4100s and also later ICL 1900 machines. We have examples at TNMOC fitted to Elliott 803 and 903, and also the Marconi TAC.
Here is the 500 cps version on our Elliott 803.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxZ1i8pvZI
An example of a variation on the same theme is the Trend UDR 350.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8P44GCse0s
PeterO
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I must be in between. I used my mother's "word processor", a Sanyo (iirc) 8086 with just over 100 k of ram, and 2 single side floppy drives (fill up disk side 1, get told to flip the diskette like an old LP to write on side 2. 180k per side.
I got a box of 8 inch diskettes from the UK CAA. They made brilliant frisbees!
tagline made me think it was going to be some overenthusiastic hole punch work...
I knew someone who needed hard sectored disks in a hurry and tried to add extra holes to soft sectored disks with an office hole punch. It worked better than I thought it would. (One out of six attempts stored enough data for what he was doing, long enough to get proper disks.)
I heard a similar second-hand story about that - programs and data loaded from paper tape kept being corrupted. It took them a while but the problem was eventually tracked down to a clueless newbie in charge of occasional paper tape loading - he was getting bored and poking the occasional extra hole in the tape with the point of a pencil.
By the time of the IBM PC, disks were mostly soft sector. But before (and overlapping) that, there were a zillion disk formats. I had software (UniForm) that could do many of them, and there were a lot of hard-sector formats listed. Before that, I used IBM 8 inch, and those were soft-sectored. Never did run into hard sectors, think by the early 1990s they were not common. There's a list at stackexchange but I remember there being more.
The point about soft sectoring is that you could pretty well define your own number of sectors per track on your floppy disk. One of the early general operating systems for office desktop computers was CP/M - and every version of CP/M did their soft sectoring differently.
At the time, I worked at a startup, where one of the services we supplied was the ability to take a disk which had data on it using one version of CP/M and transfer the files to another disc which could used on another version of CP/M. The only time we were ever defeated was when someone wanted us to transfer data to a CP/M system which used hard-sectored floppies.
Once IBM PCs and their clones came along, it all became a single standard. One of the few things MS-DOS did right compared to CP/M.
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.
I have absolutely no experience with using a Mac. I'm still called to troubleshoot the resident graphics designer's Mac if / when it goes wrong. Despite the person in question having years (and almost infinite percent) more experience than me, I'm still the one who manages to fix it.
I don't expect everyone to exhibit the same level of problem-solving and internet-based research (yes, Google) that I do, but I do expect them to have enough basic skill and intelligence to do their job. The kind of manager who prefers to hand off a problem to someone else before using their own brain earns little respect from me.
I have absolutely no experience with using a Mac. I'm still called to troubleshoot the resident graphics designer's Mac if / when it goes wrong
I think most of us have had that kind of experience, particularly in our early careers. As I've mentioned here previously, back in the 1990s I was working at a radio station - officially fixing broadcast kit and keeping the inane drivel on-air. Computers arrived and while most of the office staff had some kind of training or other, I didn't because I "knew about" computers already. Yeah, RiscOS and VMS.
The classic example was a secretary who had been on a three-day training course on Excel and ran into some trouble when VAT increased from 15% to 17½%. Of course, muggins - who had never had hands-on with a spreadsheet in his life though he knew the principles - was called in to help. I did wonder if they had taught anything in that class beyond "here is the icon you need to double-click to launch Excel".
There are some people who simply don't want to learn. Or even to "think".
M.
What it really shows is that people are put in front of a computer with no training and expected to know how things work, "because everyone does".
Windows has been telling us during the install for a couple a decades about how "intuitive" it is to use. Why would anyone need training? </sarc>
An elderly reletive called me this one time saying she could start any programs. "Crap", thinks I, what could this be, so started with the basic diagnostics questioning and it turns out the Task Bar is "missing". It took a while to figure out that at some stage she'd managed to minimise the Task Bar down to about one pixel height. There was still a grey line along the bottom of the screen. If it had merely been "hidden", it should have popped up when moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen, but that wasn't it. I eventually managed to talk her through carefully grabbing the Task Bar and click dragging it back to normal. Phew! That would have a been a 200 mile round trip and no option of remote log-in then.
My favourite one was the user who insisted her email would disappear overnight. She had her machine re-imaged on multiple occasions, but it was still happening, and our helpdesk were stumped.
Eventually I agreed to visit one evening and then again the following morning. I sent a test email around 5PM, and it showed in her inbox. Visited the following morning, and she proudly pointed to the fact the email was no longer there. Which it wasn't, as Outlook had helpfully moved it from the "Today" category, which was expanded, to the "Yesterday" category, which wasn't...
In fairness to the hell-desk, it was a new feature which was only introduced when the machine was updated with a new version of office, and their machines wouldn't get done until at least a year later, but it's a good
One week I went over and put a small piece of Sellotape across the optical sensors on our their mice.
The Sun optical mice with specially patterned pads were great fun - turn the pad through 90° and they became very unreliable and nobody really thought about pad orientation as a problem (until they'd been had a couple of times).
I managed a tech support team, and came in one morning to find a very distressed sysadmin who couldnt perform the daily checks as the mouse wasn't working.
It turned out the head of department had visited the DC the evening before, saw the lovely shiny metal mouse mat and decided it would look very good on his desk.
I had to go in and physically take it from his grasping hands
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,
Many years ago, before I retired, I was working on a project in an outpost in Stevenage. The local IT helpdesk was in the same building, so they could (and did) visit users' desks when needed. They also local ran a display wall, back at base, where the least intelligent calls we displayed for posterity.
One such was a call from a user who said that his/her mouse was almost completely unresponsive. A visit to the desk elicited the following facts:
[1] the mouse in question was a promotional mouse from some IT show or other;
[2] the mouse in question was made entirely out of plastic foam, with no electrical functionality whatsoever;
[3] the only reason that the user observed any response at all was that sometimes in moving the promotional mouse, the user had accidentally bumped the desk, causing the real mouse to move at random.
I remember when I got our first HD TV in 2004(?). I was checking out the local stations and found one had a full time radar feed of our area. It was apparently the weatherman's computer as there was a mouse pointer going across the screen at the time.
My kids saw the moving mouse pointer and wanted me to give them the remote so they could play with it. They were disappointed that it wasn't a game.
I wondered where your story was going. https://www.snopes.com/ap/2021/03/18/tv-anchors-storms-video/ is a now-abbreviated copy of a news report of a TV studio whose weather presenter got to report that a storm with tornado flavoring was about to hit THEM. Or to come way too close, anyway.
You "just" had a giant arrow flying across the sky. :-)
For a while, BBC1 television had idents where a hot air balloon with a world globe design flew over various parts of the country, including the famous Forth Bridge. So any other time that I saw the bridge, I had the urge to look around for the balloon.
First generation optical mice needed a reflective pad with a grid of black lines to read movement data. One colleague was used to the mechanical type and took the mouse without the pad to work from home. When she came back she complained that the mouse would only work on a scratched frying pan and even then, not that well. I can't imagine what surfaces she tried before settling on the cooking utensils but I suspect that her WFH was from the kitchen in lieu of a proper study.
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...
I think I've recounted this story here before, but in my current place of work we have several buildings. In one room (part warehouse storage and part plant) of this building, we have a network device that links to the factory building. It's plugged into the wall, with a label on it saying "Do not turn off".
One day, a gentleman comes in to service the boiler. And shortly after the network goes down. The factory is cut off from the site's internet connection, and from a few of our servers. Guess what had happened. Yep, the pipe-basher had unplugged the bloody thing so he could plug in his drill. The IT director, not usually a shouty man, was on him in seconds and tore him a new one.
The red sockets at work were connected to a large UPS.
Note the "were".
It didn't survive the power requirements of trying to start up an industrial vacuum cleaner. It was intended to run three or four PCs (but not the monitors) for a while in case of short power cuts. If was not intended for a sudden dump of far more power that it was designed for. The sudden load (that briefly dims the lights in normal use) destroyed the thing before any overload protection had a hope of rescuing the situation.
If anybody ever has this problem, I solved it by getting the cleaners sockets and machines changed to use a different type of socket by our site sparky.
This was the last time we had a problem with this again. The users couldn't plug things into the cleaners sockets so they were always free, and the cleaners couldn't use any of the other sockets even if they did unplug something.
We actually have a K subtype for computers. The two round holes are changed to two diagonal slots to stop people putting other electrical devices in.
At one om the places I was a supporter. There was an engineer who wanted to plug a radio in. So he changed the plug to one with the diagonal slots. As the signal strength was not that good. He scraped some paint off a metal radiator pipe, and soldered a wire from the antenna to it…. One thunderstorm later, we replaced all 12 of the PC’s in the department, and he found a new job.
Might not matter with a nearby lightning strike.
I've seen a ground-strike take out all the plugged in electronics in three properly wired houses[0] surrounding the strike point ... strangely enough, an identically wired fourth house was closest to the strike by about 20 feet, and yet remained untouched.
Lightning is funny stuff. The afore mentioned Engineer might have been a scapegoat.
[0] Post-Korea tract housing in Santa Rosa, California.
Couple of decent types missing from that list. We used a lot of Electrak at the radio station for similar reasons, and the UK type ("G") comes in variants with rotated pins (either the earth or the live pins or both) and with differently-shaped earth pins.
M.
That site is wrong about Type E (France). That is 3 pin, with the earth pin actually being on the socket. The picture of the plug is wrong, that's a Type F (Schuko). A real type E has no earth contacts on the body, just the receptacle on the face. This makes it UNSAFELY compatible with F, as an E plug goes into an F socket, but does not connect the earth.
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.
When I was 17 I won a Commodore PET for my school in a competition. They already had one of those, but they didn't have the disk drive which I also won. My maths teacher, who ran the school computing club, was so excited that she kissed me. I've never seen a middle aged woman look so embarrassed so quickly.
I first encountered the Commodore PET in the mid 1980s when I worked for a large Government organisation and the head tech manager bought a couple for us "to play with". We didn't get very far until we bought a copy of Raeto West's invaluable handbook. I still have my copy in the attic but I might just put it on the market to see what price it will fetch! https://www.amazon.co.uk/Programming-PET-Raeto-Collin-West/dp/0950765007
We used to frisbee the discs across the classroom. Did Steve want the disc with Repton on? Pluck it out of the disc box and fris it over.
Sadly, while the Master Compact filing system was much more advanced (the A in ADFS!), it just wasn't quite the same with 3.5" rigid discs.
I remember how amazingly fast discs seemed compared to loading from tape on the BBC Micros at school.
My first disk drive was a CBM-1541, so me not so much... :)
It did have it's own CPU though.
And it was super reliable so there was never really any need to VERIFY after you'd waited 30 seconds for your program to save..... :)
When I ran out of floppies and cash I used to punch extra index holes and notches in the sleeve and insert them in the drive upside down - I was able to convert many single sided floppies to double that way.
On the Apple ][ there was no need for an extra index hole, just that extra notch was sufficient.
"When I ran out of floppies and cash I used to punch extra index holes and notches in the sleeve and insert them in the drive upside down - I was able to convert many single sided floppies to double that way."
I remember a friend telling how that was such a waste of time and money because it didn't work. It turned out he was punching the new index hole right through the sleeve and disk and therefore adding a second index hole in some random position.
I needed some longer fibre cables and found a dusty jiffy bag (bad sign) at the back of the stores. Opened the jiffy bag to discover the packer had obviously discovered it was too small and had folded the fibres in half to get them to fit in the pouch.
Bad enough they had decided to use a soft squishy jiffy bag, but to then compound the error by ignoring the minimum bending radius!
I needed 15 metres of 25mm power cable for a remote supply feed. I went to the local wholesalers, paid the horrifying amount of money required, and the server then proceeded to start FOLDING IT INTO ONE METRE LENGTHS!!!!!!!!!!!
I've never moved so fast as I reached over the counter to grab it from his hands. NO!!!!!!! I NEED 15 METRES OF POWER CABLE, NOT 15 ONE-METRE POWER CABLES!!!!!
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....
"Given that the DD media was manufactured as HD but failed to make the grade"
That's not how that works. HD media has a completelty different surface coating than DD media. The grains are a different size, the magnetic coercivity is different. DD disks are *NOT* "failed" HD disks. A failed HD disk is a failed HD disk. It's like saying a 24" bicycle tyre is a failed 48" tyre.
I think Ferranti was the only outfit out your way that fiddled about with 5-bit tape ... and that was paper tape. But only briefly, in the early '60s.
I can probably read your old ICL tape, and I'm hardly unique. Anybody who has one or three of these things squirreled away can ask at a Uni with a well established computing program. They will be able to point you to a place that'll probably be happy to recover it for free, partially as a learning tool for the current crop of youngsters.
I remember the Ferranti Sirius - 5-track paper tape, and delay-line main store. One of its opcodes was "Branch if Approximately Equal", which sounds insane until you are dealing with floating point numbers.
One of our lecturers wrote a FORTRAN compiler for it, just to prove it could be done.
Another Sirius (AKA Victor 9000) squeezed 1.2MB on the same floppy media that IBM put 360KB, by using more sectors on the outer tracks. A stepper motor was used for the variable rotation speed.
IIRC, IBM 3274 terminal controllers used 8" hard-sectored floppies.
I doubt c50 years of print-through will have done it any good. Because QUB computing access was card-based in those days* I got the tape transferred to boxes of cards as a special job. It eventually got transferred onto floppies via VAX and Kermit.
*There was an individual HD allocation of 100k ICL 24bit words available.
Those things still terrify me ... I believe DriveSavers will recover them for a fee, in a worst-case scenario.
drivesaversdatarecovery.com ... recommended when you absolutely, positively have to recover it.
Not affiliated, don't own stock, no friends on the Board, yadda, just a happy customer.
@Ian Johnston
You may be able get the recovery done by a computer history museum. They often have access to the needed equipment and want to preserve a variety of material. (A friend managed to recover an academic experimental OS for the CDC 3200 (IIRC) and some ALWAC code this way.
@Ian Johnston: our uni developed a home-grown timeharing OS on the CDC 3300L; it was called "OS-3". It was more popular with users than CDC's offering ("SCOPE", IIRC), and we took to running the 3300 solely on OS-3. Sadly, I have no media of any sort with the OS source (or even binaries), but would love to find it!
We had discs, 7-track mag tapes, card reader, card punch, line printer, a Calcomp plotter, a few CRT terminals, some modems, and scads of Teletype ASR-33s. A DEC PDP-8 acted as a front-end processor for the Teletypes and modems.
Well no, just a bit of time until we've got ours set up again, and postage to the Netherlands.
For getting it back to you we can probably use that newfangled Internet thingie.
(El Reg, how about a cobwebs icon? Suggestion here: https://hack42.nl/mediawiki/images/thumb/8/8f/Warnung-cobwebs.png/100px-Warnung-cobwebs.png )
is a stack of punch cards with an inventory control system written in COBOL.
I did lend a local government agency a 5.25" floppy drive a few years ago so they could read old records that were somehow necessary despite their having been inaccessible for ages.
No tax rebate was forthcoming, the ingrates.
I don't lend the local .govs my old kit in order to fix their failures to plan for the future.
Rather I charge them for it. Charge them a LOT for it.
Made over $30,000 a couple months ago ... to pull property records off just over four boxes of punch cards. Added up to four bucks per card ... and they were happy to pay it.
The guy who signed them out to me asked if I was coming back for the rest ... seems there are another 200 or 250 boxes stacked in one corner of County Records, dated from the late '40s through the mid '70s. He seemed genuinely sad when I returned them and requested a receipt for same.
We were able to get permission to take taxis around London when visiting our HQ as "the motors on the tube will corrupt our important floppies".
The earlier version, and the reason(*) I got taxis between London rail stations, was that tube train motors would corrupt 12 inch "washing machine" disk packs.
(*) To be pedantic, it was the excuse - the reason was that lugging 12" disk packs on the Tube, especially in the rush hour, was a bugger to do.
3 Mb Pertec removable packs were (and the one in my kitchen still is) 15". I knew of the rumour that taking them on the Underground would corrupt them but I had no option well before dawn on the day of the
formal announcement & demonstration of version 1.0 of a big new product. This was occasioned by the project leader (and later co-founder of at least 3 companies AtC has worked for...) turning up with a 1/2" tape of the latest version to install on a Pr1me computer that had no tape drive as delivered. I don't recollect the size of the CDC 80 Mb "washing machine" packs but I'm sure they were more than 12".
Not only have I used the Z89, I've taken it apart in High School to add more memory, along with a companion Z100 upgrade system. Ah... fond memories (stockholm syndrome?) of using Magic Text, Peach Text and the like to do mailmerge mailing of marketing dosh.
8" floppies were last used by the US Defense Department in June of 2019.
The last new 8" floppies were made in 2015ish.
IBM still has tons of the silly things, should you need one ... or you can purchase NOS[0] on places like fleabay.
A couple of weekends from now I will be doing the annual cleaning & adjusting (if needed) of a couple of 8" floppy drives that have been in near daily use since the late 1970s. They are attached to a couple pieces of equipment at a machine shop located in SillyConValley. I've replaced the read/write heads & the motors a couple times each with NOS parts that I squirreled away in the '90s .... sometimes being a packrat pays the bills.
[0] New Old Stock ... brand new product that's been on the shelf for a while.
A couple of weekends from now I will be doing the annual cleaning & adjusting (if needed) of a couple of 8" floppy drives that have been in near daily use since the late 1970s. They are attached to a couple pieces of equipment at a machine shop located in SillyConValley. I've replaced the read/write heads & the motors a couple times each with NOS parts that I squirreled away in the '90s .... sometimes being a packrat pays the bills.
A definite tip of the hat for that, but depending on how much old stock you've got stashed away, have you considered wiring up an Arduino or an RP 2040 to emulate the drives? I'd have expected the floppies to start wearing out.
I have fall-overs tested and ready (yes, Arduino), but the machinists hate the idea. They don't feel/sound/smell right, and the timing is wrong (it's not), so we stick to the floppies. And half inch, 9-track tape. We have a climate controlled closet with NOS media for all the machines, plus a couple shelves of my rebuild kit. It's probably enough to continue for over a century. It'll certainly outlive me :-)
In this day and age, the care and feeding of half a dozen genuine tool and die makers (and about the same number of up and coming apprentices) is far more important than being modern. Machines quite simply can not reproduce the magic they do on a daily basis.
Nothing beats you brain into submission and never forgetting something like a "Duh!" momemnt. Coding is the best way to find lots of them, 3 hours staring a piece of code, keep running it hoping the solution will magically appear, get a coffee, come back and...WTF! Why is there an extra semi-colon right there and how the hell haven't I spotted it for the last 3 hours?!! FFS!!
Better still, a colleague on the brink of a nervous breakdown begs you to help them scan 10 lines of code that won't run, you spot the problem in 2 secs. Gratitude and much swearing ensure!
You need a cardboard colleague. Often the simple act of calling a colleague over explaining the problem to them provides sufficient space and time to reorganise your thinking enough to see what you need to do to fix it. You could just as usefully used a cardboard cutout rather than an actual colleague. One benefit of a human colleague over the cardboard one is that you can then suggest going for a coffee to celebrate your progress.
Also known in this office as the "rubber duck" method of problem solving.
My colleague, now departed for greener pastures, would quite often just reply "quack" when I explained a problem to him, and then solved it immediately with no input. I returned the favour frequently.
Exactly. When stuck, I explain in great detail exactly what I am doing and why to whichever cat or dog is nearby. They appreciate the attention, and going into enough detail to teach a canid or feline how Berkeley Sockets work at a ones and zeros level usually points out the obvious fairly quickly.
Somewhat strangely, talking to the damn fool b0rken equipment itself doesn't seem to work ... My wife says it's because the kit is afraid of me (I have tools, and I'm not afraid to use them), whereas the critters are not.
When I was starting out QUB had a couple of support staff (PhD students probably) who provided a couple of hours support a day. Several time I'd solved a problem by explaining it them. That was a more useful lesson to learn than solving the actual problems.
I can't remember whether it was Amstrad Action or one (or more) of the books I had that used it but I seem to remember having a program that echoed a 16-bit checksum (I think it was literally just a sum of the bytes, not anything fancy like a CRC) every time you entered a line of code or after every line when LISTing a program. You could then quickly cross-check that against the one printed in the mag/book.
Very useful when entering a long listing.
...and recently I had so much trouble finding a recording device (or a colleague) that I could make read out a list of place names to check against the version that I'd typed. My PC has one but it doesn't work. Then I tried to leave a voice message to myself on Microsoft Teams. Nope.
It's only just occurred to me that I could have got a machine to read out what I'd typed, to compare to what I should have typed. But I'm in Scotland, so that would be something of an auchtermuchty for me and for the computer.
My first real introduction to programming came from a Jeff Duntemann book. Somewhere in there was a list of rules for working programmers. Among them was one that said explaining your problem to colleagues was so important, that if necessary you should be prepared to lure them in with food to get them to listen. That one was fairly easy to follow.
The one that said mistakes should be framed, and hung on the wall was a bit harder to follow...
I find it quite amusing that most people (self included) can read their own writing a dozen times, and still manage to overlook the most obvious of typos ... and yet any idiot can (and usually does!) spot the typo instantly, and with malice aforethought.
If it's important to you, get a trusted non-brown-nosing friend or three to proof read it for you.
It doesn’t have to be techie stuff, I run a car club and produce the monthly newsletter, after writing each issue and proof checking it, I then hand it over to someone else to read (and usually find a couple of errors) before I go and print it.
Nobody can proof their own writing accurately it is why oublications employ sub editors
"If it's important to you, get a trusted non-brown-nosing friend or three to proof read it for you."
One of the first jobs I was given as a research assistant was checking the proofs - page proofs - of a paper for the Irish equivalent of Proc. Roy Soc. This was in the days if physical type so if it got to page proofs corrections were almost forbidden because of the risk of changing the pagination.
The paper was about sea level changes so it contained a god number of elevations which had been surveyed in imperial measure with the metric equivalents in brackets. I checked a conversion. I was wrong. I checked another. That was wrong. The whole lot were wrong.
This was from one of the authors' PhD thesis. To get to that stage it had got past his supervisor (my new boss and the co-author), his external examiner, the rewriting as a paper, the journal editors, the journal's referees and the proof-reading of the galleys.
Many years ago, my boss and a co-worker returned from a site visit saying "You'll love Robert Smith". When I got to the site, I learned what they meant. Robert Smith sat behind a desk and smiled. The smile did not vary with what one told him, that I could see, good news, bad news, or mere indifferent information. As far as I could tell he did nothing but smile. However, the powers that were had given Robert an assistant, Roberta, who did not smile, and who did respond to the environment, and who did accomplish things.
For certain work, they needed hard-sectored 8.5" floppies, and had come up with floppies of the correct size, but soft-sectored. I explained that these would not work. Roberta tested every floppy in the box to be sure that I wasn't bluffing them.
(Names regomized, but they were of that pattern.)
Many years later this type of On Call is still happening, albeit not 'floppy' disks, just incompatible or out of date media. Such as Zip disks, DVD-Ram (thanks Panasonic for the worm drive that you couldn't actually use to write video DVDs ). Today it'll be memory stick, SD card or compact flash that was used by every team in a company, and we all have those stories about those !
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