Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Welcome back once again, dear reader, to the untidy corner of The Reg we call Who Me? in which readers' confessions are filed in the dusty shadows until rediscovered. At the top of the creaking pile of submissions this week we found a reader we'll Regomize as "Jock" who leaned way back on his rocking chair to recount for us a …

[ColinPa]

Where is the unsend button?

I was PA to a senior manager who, in a moment of clarity, sent an email to all of his managers saying "this project is a mess - and this is what we are going to do about it". He came round to me about 10 minutes later saying he should not have sent it... can I go and delete it as it should have said "DO NOT PASS ON". I went to the IT department with a list of managers, and we started to delete the email from manager's in boxes.

A little while later someone found me and told me to stop what I was doing. Some of the managers had already sent it on to their staff.

Instead of being a disaster, the general feeling was it was a good email, it was good to hear that the senior manager had the same view as the troops. The senior manager ended up by getting lots of kudos.

[nintendoeats]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

I can see that. Gaining great insight and courage in the moment, then coming down from the high and going "oh god what have I done!?"

Unfortunately one can never say for sure which part of one's brain is correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

"I was PA to a senior manager who, in a moment of clarity, sent an email to all of his managers saying "this project is a mess - and this is what we are going to do about it"."

Ah, the never ending stories of PA sending stuff ...

Once, I remember one PA, dumb as a stone, who was also the CIO's PA (CIO, being more or less too old and brain dead to even talk properly or go to the piss by himself).

Every now and then, PA would send something to the wrong person and then would shout all over the IT department that, according to her retarded understanding of a global email directory, we should "sort it to have important persons first for her".

What a fuckwit she was.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

In this case it was the manager, not the PA, who sent it.

[Dave559]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

"CIO, being more or less too old and brain dead to even talk properly or go to the piss by himself"

Ah, the Chief Incontinence Officer…

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

"Ah, the Chief Incontinence Officer…"

Or Chief Inaudible Officer ...

Good one !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

No offence

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

Are we still allowed to talk about "retarded bombs"?

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

And I can tell you that 'ignition retard' is not the act of setting those that are slow of mind on fire!

<--------- Brave enough NOT to post AC! I like my jokes hairy, scary, and likely to cause offense!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

Agree - I know we're IT professionals, but there's no need to be unnecessarily cruel.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

Indeed. Let's save our cruelty for our users.

[FIA]

Re: Where is the unsend button?

What a fuckwit she was.

Has anyone seen my magnet? I'm sure I left it around here somewhere.

[Joe W]

Communication....

There was this BOFH episode with terms like "fire it up" or "give it a bash"...

Hm. Now I need to go through the archives again and waste some time. Though I believe that this should count as professional development...

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Re: Communication....

What was your username now again?

<clickety><click>

a-hup-yup, BOFH withdrawal symptoms due to lack of a regular BOFH diet.

[doublelayer]

Re: Communication....

Any day's a good day for a BOFH. The one you mentioned is here.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so much destroy as waste hundreds of boxes of fan-fold paper.....

This was back at my first job involving mainframes. Came in on night shift and read through the shift handover as usual. One special job to be run - a complete dump of the stock. It finished within an hour or so of the start of the shift, and started to print. And print. And print. We had a crappy shift as we were undermanned, and the printer wouldn't fold the paper correctly. We went through nearly the entire stock of paper we had (and that was a LOT of paper).

When the boss turns up in the morning he has a fit. Why did we print this all off? There was a note in the shift handover to NOT print it off. I argued, grabbed the shift handover log and showed him. No message. Until we turned back a couple of pages and found someone had made a mistake, crossed off the section including that day's instructions, copied it all to the a new page where they FORGOT to add the one particular line that said not to print this job's output.

I still miss those days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Best use of line printers

Never was more fan-fold paper wasted^h^h^h^h^h^h put to better use than on ASCII art wall decorations. This one is SFW while I don't remember any from the last millennium that were

https://archive.org/details/ascii-star-trek-uhura-1976

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Best use of line printers

Oh, I don't know. We had an empty night in the colour lab as production was going through a general extruders clean (mandatory when you switch from dark to light plastics). Eventually we ran out of Yahtzee forms, at which point the copy we prudently made of the 8" boot floppy of the spectrum analyser came in handy.

Boot, little basic program, run. No more yahtzee form shortage :).

[Pascal Monett]

Procedure update

I'm guessing that the New Year came with an updated procedure concerning the printing and manipulation of the end-of-year share certificates.

I'm also guessing that reprinting was not an option for some asinine accounting reason. I can reprint my invoices as often as I like, they don't change number, they don't change total and printing does not impact my customers' accounts.

But hey, this is the 21st century, so . . .

[Terje]

Re: Procedure update

Accounting is obviously magic so for some arcane reason only the first printing works for use in the blood sacrifices!

I always wonder what went wrong in the upbringing of a person who decide to become an accountant...

[Just An Engineer]

Re: Procedure update

I think I know the Answer.

It might be just me but, every accountant I have ever met was smart a hell, but utterly lacked ANY common sense.

Hench the reason for such arcane "Accounting Rules".

[UCAP]

Re: Procedure update

I knew one accountant who was definitely as smart as hell and also had loads of common sense. My late father.

The best piece of advice he ever gave me was to NEVER become and accountant. I was very careful to follow that advise to the letter.

Sad face, because after over 22 years I still mix my old man.

[doublelayer]

Re: Procedure update

In my experience, accountants tend to be a lot like us. When we explain to somebody (in my case only when they ask and after warning them that they don't care) about how a compiler works, or what DNS is for and why you need it, or what makes for a well-designed database, people find it very boring and also difficult to understand. Accountants have a different set of interests that they're good at solving but involve a lot of complex moving parts that we don't know a lot about, likely in this case related to the concern that certificates that weren't confirmed destroyed could be used in a fraud scheme, and even the appearance that a fraud scheme was possible wasn't acceptable. Those details would have taken some explanation about how share certificate processing worked in that company, though.

Just as there are people who work in tech and can't make a database that works at all, this doesn't mean that accountants are necessarily good at what they do or at connecting what they do to the rest of the organization. I think the best accountants are like the best technical staff, good at making their complex knowledge work for those who don't want to know about it, even if that involves hiding from those who don't understand and just getting things done.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Procedure update

My guess is that back then, forms like that were ordered pre-numbered from a secure paper provider, and had a serial number that could not be duplicated. Just a guess though.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Procedure update

"I always wonder what went wrong in the upbringing of a person who decide to become an accountant..."

I think it was The Mary Whitehouse Experience on radio that ran the joke about John Major "A man so boring he ran away from a circus to become an accountant".

[Cheshire Cat]

Re: Procedure update

And also the Bank Manager in Terry Pratchett's "Making Money".

GNU TP

[Ball boy]

Re: Procedure update

Share certificates are a record of ownership. To prevent some nefarious individual running off handfuls of of them and so enriching themselves on the sly, there would most likely have been some barrier to a simple reprint. If nothing else, the bank would have needed to keep the original, damaged version for a period of time as proof the 'replacement' was, indeed, a replacement and not a get-rich-quick scheme!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

Does make me wonder what would happen if the printer ran out of ink, or the paper jammed, or any of the multitude of other ways a print can fail.

But I can definitely understand the 'must be unique' nature of such things.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

The process we used to follow was to write a small program (in FoxPro no less) where the user running the print would enter the stock number of the first one used, against the sequential UID in the file being printed. If there is a break or a misprint, then the last good print would be recorded as the end of that range, and a new range started, on the next item of good stock, noting the number for that and the file number.

The file sequence numbers are then tied up against the share issuer's identifier (usually an account number for the person) and this way, an output file can be produced that ties the stock number to that identifier for each share certificate that has been successfully printed. All the spoils, lead-ins, and unused stock is then cancelled by the issuer, and if a certificate turned up with one of those numbers on it, the holder would get themselves arrested for securities fraud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

...I'll add, that in this case, the person doing the "tearing up" should have been properly supervised, and their mistake noticed after only a handful of certificates had been destroyed. The solution then would have been to reprint those destroyed certificates on remaining stock, IIRC, there would usually be enough of a stock overrun to accommodate 10-15% waste.

The bits of the destroyed certificates should have been pulled from the general waste and thrown in the secure waste to be pulped - any facility printing share certificates nowadays would be required to have such a waste stream under ISO 27001, which they would need to have been certified under to be doing the job in the first place.

Of course, this story takes place back in the "before times" way before such data security practices existed, and is probably one of the many incidents that lead to it existing.

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: Procedure update

"way before such data security practices existed"

You might be surprised. They didn't have ISO numbers back then, but banks have had data security practices since Roman times at least.

When we printed checks, the blank stock was all numbered and needed to be inventoried. Printing checks was done under dual control (as you note, `the person doing the "tearing up" should have been properly supervised`), stock numbers and check numbers were tallied and recorded in the log. I never printed certificates but I suppose our procedure would have been similar. It sounds like patching the certificate together was the procedure for recovering a *single* bad print, and lacking a procedure for the loss of an entire run they had to apply the same finicky procedure to each certificate.

[TDog]

Re: Procedure update

And when I worked for a certain logistics support firm in the late 90's they were still passing round a script to make things easier; which granted top level rights to whoever ran it in SQL server. There was also no security either physical nor IT on the cheque printer and the only concern they seemed to have was whether or not I could legally write an API which would require only 1 licence to access the DB, rather than one per user.

They were actually very good at repeating the practices of the 1950's in logistic support, very good at bringing their accountancy into the 1970's, superb at loosing their copy of the contract which stated that whether the access was through an interface or direct they still required a licence per user, immensely concerned at saving a few tens of hundreds of pounds by taking acts that could well have been described as fraud (I did say I dealt with their management, not their accountants) and couldn't give a shit that I could create a firm, add it to their billing list and pull shed loads of money out, removing the sums from their reported in payments and from their out payments, so that the books still ballanced and it would take me about four hours plus the fifteen seconds it required me to get to the cheque printer, to which I had access as I was supposed to be responsible for physical issues there too.

Oh, and just before someone says that it would have shown in the outgoings, that was done through the same server account too. So if you did a paper reconcilliation you would find it matched the SQL server, it would have only been if you did a line by line check you might have found the "missing links".

And they were trying to save a few hundred (<5K) pounds a year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

Sounds very much like the management at the company I worked for, which had all sorts of security procedures about "you can't take any cameras in the building so, your phone must be locked in a locker all day," but also managed to "misplace" an entire "York" container (one of those man-height steel-cages on wheels) full of post and blame it on the Royal Mail, before rediscovering it, and destroying the contents rather than 'fess up to the client.

Their management practices made the House of Commons look like a paragon of honesty.

For some reason, they went out of business about a year after I left.

(same AC here)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

They would have been legal documents (with the status of promissory notes) and each had to be unique. The ability to print duplicates would have easily led to fraud and control should be second only to printing banknotes (which, as many people don't realise, are also promissory notes).

[richardcox13]

Re: Procedure update

(At the danger of opening the can of worms...)

(which, as many people don't realise, are also promissory notes)

This depends on the jurisdiction and issurer.

Eg. Scottish banknotes are promissory notes (which is part of why they are not legal tender[1] anywhere), whereas Bank of England banknotes are not (and are legal tender outside Scotland[2]).

[1] This has little practical meaning, "legal tender" is only meaningful in some narrow classes of debt payment.

[2] There are no bank notes that are legal tender in Scotland.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Procedure update

> There are no bank notes that are legal tender in Scotland

It should be noted that Scotland has a separate legal system to that of England and Wales.

If I remember correctly the importance and status of "legal tender" is somewhat different here and the legal position is that people are required to accept reasonable methods of payment, whether or not that method meets the technical definition of "legal tender". (Don't quote me on that, however).

[richardcox13]

Re: Procedure update

Definition of legal tender is the some (or at least close enough).

Which involves payment of a debt, not just any payment. Eg. doesn't apply when getting a sarnie at M&S for lunch.

It would apply to settling a restaurant bill however. And it is also only applies when providing the exact payment (can't ask for change).

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Procedure update

My point wasn't that the definition of legal tender was necessarily different, it was how the legal system approached the requirement (or otherwise) for debts to be settled with legal tender.

(But this is all from fuzzy memory, might be wrong and- as I said- don't quote me on any of it).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

AFIAK all banknotes are promissory notes, even Bank of England ones (it's actually printed on them). They were originally backed by commodities (e.g.gold) but no longer; their value (exchange rate) is reasonably predictable with stable currencies (e.g. USD, EUR or GBP - for the time being) but inflation can change that - whether used in exchange for another currency or commodities.

BofE notes are legal tender in England and Wales; they're not legal tender in Scotland, however - that right is limited to BofE coins.

Being "legal tender" doesn't mean they have to be accepted in shops, etc (the legal tender status only relates the ability to sue for non-payment of debt); what some people don't realise is that there are limited on small denomination coins - 1p and 2p are only legal tender up to 20p. However, all UK issued banknotes will be accepted in most places through the UK; ironically, one place that wouldn't accept a Scottish banknote from me was the British Museum cafe! On another occasion, I used on at Hong Kong airport to buy a book, but a £10 face value was only accepted at £9...

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: Procedure update

when in doubt, either in England or Scotland, you can still use Euros

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Procedure update

If my experience in a similar job is anything to go by:

They would have been printed on special (probably numbered) stock.

Just enough stock would have been produced to cover the run of share certificates, plus a small amount for "spoils".

The numbers on "spoils" and unused stock would have been carefully noted and cancelled once the print job was complete.

The same goes for things like cheque stock with pre-printed cheque numbers (in magnetic toner), where the recipient and amount are printed onto the stock.

So, for example, if there were 2,000 certificates to print, then there might have been 2,500 in the stock, you'd waste a couple at the front loading and aligning the printer, running off proofs, paper jams, etc. and expect to have a good number left over.

Of course, when I was working in a similar industry the best part of 20 years ago, we had reel-fed printers that used rolls of stock that weighed about a tonne each and fed through the printer at 440 feet per minute. Make sure you'd tucked your tie in first before running off those proofs (yes they did still make us wear ties, in the 21st century).

Posted anon, because this contains way too much info that could identify me...

[Lil Endian]

Re: Procedure update

Make sure you'd tucked your tie in first...

If suited and booted I always wear a tie clip for this reason, from insane line printers to going up a cherry picker[1].

[1] Yup, before the safety elves where ubiquitous I'd often be up a cherry picker on site, usually checking cable runs. Miss those days!

[I Am Spartacus]

The joy that is printing

I did an audit of a place which processed very sensitive information. The ultra, company critical stuff which, if released to unauthorised parties could bring the company to its knees. And as this was a small country, bring down the government as well.

The computers were all in secure areas. The code was well protected. Password were secure and changed regularly, with decent password policy and no password reuse. The users were in a separate, locked room, with key card access. They even needed their key cards to access their terminals, so going to the loo meant that their screen automatically locked. It all looked great.

Until I went through the control points for a typical job run. The run was securely started. It was properly audited. The processingwas done and saved in secure file sets, and then the results were printed for examination.

Me: "And where do the printouts go"

Senior Operator: "Oh, we put an elastic band around the line printer output and put it in the pidgeon holes outside the print room."

Me: "You mean the open area, in the corridor, where people walk past all the time?"

Senior Operator: "Oh, yes, I can see there is a problem here!"

Next week they ordered a new printer for the secure room!

[Anonymous South African Coward]

Re: The joy that is printing

007 was already there.

[Korev]

Re: The joy that is printing

Bond in the context of this Who Me is quite apt

[WonkoTheSane]

Re: The joy that is printing

Basildon?

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: The joy that is printing

Hey, a senior operator admitting a problem! That type must be kept!

[Anonymous Coward]

Year end Accounts

For some reason an accounting process spooled the ear end accounts direct to the printer rather than producing a file which could be reprinted. The customer had run the process but the print file stubbornly remained in the mainframe print queue, This was a standard support call, the fix was to crash the output scheduler then restart it, nothing else would get it out of the system. Having made sure that the Printer was off-line I did exactly that, as expected the job disappeared from the print queue, but never re-appeared. Very soon I have a Finance director screaming down the phone at me while I'm trying to talk them through some diagnostic processes. Sure enough the print had reappeared in a queue but for a printer in a remote office which had been installed since the previous year end. It turned out that they were not issuing year end prints to particular locations and it had been pure luck that the first attempt had found the central printer. I offered to suspend the job and transfer it back tot he central printer but they were so freaked out they would rather wait until it printed off then have it couriered to them. The key issue was that the remote printer was going to take about 12 hours to print off the reports and it would then need to be driven over 150 miles to return it 'home'

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Year end Accounts

> spooled the ear end accounts

Am I correct in assuming that was a typo and you meant to write "ear lobe accounts"?

[chivo243]

misunderstood an instruction

Only once, when "Get in here!' really meant "Get OUT!" Like a slow motion train wreck, can't stop, can't turn away. Only having my coat as a personal belonging, it made for a quick and easy exodus! And yes, this was some time ago, back in the mid 80s.

[Korev]

It was nice of "Jock" to share the story with us

[Korev]

Hopefully he's now able to take stock of the situation...

[Wally Dug]

At least he has bonded with us.

[Antony Shepherd]

Tearing off a strip...

Back in the day when I had a Centronics 737 printer, then a Star LC10, I always used to find it quite restful tearing the sprocket hole strips off the sides of the paper.

Don't miss the noise dot-matrix printers made, though.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Tearing off a strip...

Personal history: An Epson 24-pin dot-matrix (don't remember the model) that could do 300 or 360 DPI (but looked better in 150 or 180) and used less ink. It was a leftover from my old school district, as was the IBM PS/2 running Win95 with Office 97 (I think); I was running them in college (~late 2000 to early 2002), with an external 33.6k modem for internet (mostly email and library catalog telnet) when I didn't want to use the campus computer labs.

It was the worst of both worlds: 1) noisy, being a dot-matrix, and 2) it used plain paper, so I didn't get the fun of tearing strips or separating sheets.

But, for only the cost of a new ribbon cartridge and a pack of (regular) paper, it saved me a buttload in the long run versus paying for laser printouts in the labs!

I remember my final undergraduate days: Digital Circuits Lab, summer session, June 2002, programming some TI chip in assembler, making flow diagrams in Powerpoint and code snippets in Word, then dumping it all to my own printer to turn in (project report) plus to have on hand for debugging, with the code itself in a TXT file on a floppy for loading to the evaluation board via serial. It was all oddly satisfying. I don't miss how slow that machine was, both in general and the dial-up, but I do miss it somewhat.

[Lil Endian]

Code Snippets in Word

That reminds me of my final college project, a COBOL stock control system. My class mate had a job with access to a VAX 8900 cluster, which I wrangled an account on - light years ahead of the PDP 11/73 at college.

Except, after weeks of work, I failed to print the finished source and couldn't get access to the VAX before the project deadline. D'oh! I had to re-type the entire system from notes and memory in a night on my ST (using Tempus IIRC). No COBOL on the ST so the whole thing handed in without seeing a compiler. I got a cracking result, so I'm guessing they never used a compiler on the source either!

[Spanners]

Re: Tearing off a strip...

Don't miss the noise dot-matrix printers made, though.

Very comparable to a Scorpion tank overtaking me when I was probably doing about 70!

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Tearing off a strip...

Dot matrix? Pah! My dad used to have a daisywheel printer. He had it in the front room of the house we grew up in, and we could hear it going from the bottom of the back garden, which went back quite a way...

[Lil Endian]

Re: Tearing off a strip...

Daisywheel? Pah! Any chain printer! Granted, I never had one at home though :)

[See "secure your tie" comments above lol]

[ex-ace]

Some decades back in a broker's firm in the City, the monthly payroll run, in a secure server room full of ICL's finest blinkenlights and approved personnel only, printed payslips onto fanfold paper. The top copies were for staff, the carbon copies securely filed and the carbon paper layer thrown into the bin alongside all the other rubbish in case the cleaners wondered how many times more than the Prime Minister the brokers were paid.

[hammarbtyp]

NBG

My mother fresh out of art school, got a job at a motor part manufacturer. Now this was the 50's so computers were just a glint in Bill Gates eyes, and photoshop was somewhere you got your snaps developed.

My mum worked in the graphics department whose job was to put together advertising material, in-house magazines etc. Anyway her boss pointed to a pile of photos and said the were NBG and she need to sort them out. So my mum spent an entire afternoon marking each image with NBJ in perfect painted calligraphy, and then took the pile to show her boss.

She was then told that NBG was slang was No Bloody Good and all they wanted was her to dump them into the nearest skip

[nintendoeats]

Re: NBG

I feel obliged to remind everybody that Bill Gates did not participate in the invention of the computer, the microcomputer, desktop publishing, or in fact much of anything (except perhaps new techniques for exploiting software platform ownership).

/Pedantry

[nintendoeats]

Re: NBG

Would love to see the downvoter give an accurate account of the history of computing in which Bill Gates somehow invented the computer.

[ITS Retired]

Re: NBG

A Microsoft fan boy that down votes anything not complementary of anything Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: NBG

Compl*i*mentary.

[doublelayer]

Re: NBG

I wasn't the downvoter and I wouldn't say that he did. I also don't think the original post said he did, so you're arguing against an empty panel.

If I have to guess why there is a downvote, maybe it's because Gates, though he didn't invent the computer or the microcomputer, was still rather important in the development of personal computers. Love Microsoft or hate it, and I know there are many who hate it, it's had a large impact on the market both historically and in the modern day. A lot of the design of modern computers is due to choices made by early Microsoft, just as the original design decisions of Unix when it was meant for a smaller use case and set of users are still important today. Gates, Wozniak, and Thompson didn't have to invent computers (and none of them did) to be important to their history (and all of them are).

[nintendoeats]

Re: NBG

I was referring to the following line: "Now this was the 50's so computers were just a glint in Bill Gates eyes...", which I understood to imply that Bill Gates could be described as a father of the computer. It's not the first time I've seen people directly or indirectly imply that Bill Gates was somehow important in the invention or popularity of the microcomputer, so perhaps I am overly sensitive.

While I certainly agree that Microsoft has had a large influence on the market, I have trouble with the idea that Bill Gates was important in the development of personal computers. When I think through all the different things Microsoft did, what I consistently see is them being very good at positioning themselves to ride existing waves, but I don't see them being leaders. Microsoft BASIC was very popular, but it wasn't the first or only BASIC and it could just as easily have been some other language filling that role.

Even more the with DOS and the PC...Bill Gates had the right connections to position his company to effectively "own" IBM's computing platform, and I believe he did that with foresight. But the microcomputer, its move into business, and even the IBM PC itself were things that were already happening. Microsoft have carried on that way, seeing products or ideas that were already successful and buying them to integrate into the platform. One could credibly argue that doing so brought those features to a wider audience, but in my view it's a mixed bag whether that actually benefited the audience in most cases (would users have been better off if IE hadn't been the dominant force that it was?)

I believe that the history computing is one of many inevitabilities. Eventually, people were going to recognized the advantages of cheap microcomputers in the home and office, connecting them together, and making them easier to use. When I look at the figures in computing history that I consider to be important in the broad sense, I'm looking for people who "led the charge" as it were, seeing those future trends and bringing them about. That's not what I see in the history of Microsoft (with the exception of their understanding of the power of platform ownership); thus, while I think the details of the modern computing industry would certainly be very different if Gary Kildall hadn't gotten on that damned airplane (allegedly), I don't think the shape of it would have particularly changed and I don't think any aspect of it would have happened any faster.

[Dave314159ggggdffsdds]

Re: NBG

I mean, that isn't really true. It's largely true looking only at the technical side of things, but he did a lot more in the way of usability and creating a mass-market product. Without Bill, someone else would likely have done something else in the same line at round about the same time, but without anyone doing it, we wouldn't have mass computer usage, phones as we know them, Twitter, facebook, etc etc.

Whether you credit him for that, or instead hold him responsible, is up to you :)

[nintendoeats]

Re: NBG

For me, Apple and Xerox deserve a lot more credit for improving usability, at least in the 80s. Once you get into the 90s, I would argue that Microsoft was leading in usability more because of their market dominance than anything else. Most other successful computing platforms at that point were not aimed at the home or (non-technical) office market, because those audiences were completely wrapped up in the Windows platform already (Apple as well, but they were going through their weird phase). So while I agree that Windows was and remains a very friendly platform for non-techies, I'd also say that MS deliberately created an environment in which nearly anybody else trying to fill that role was either destroyed or consumed (often via very sketchy business practices).

It's like if somebody opens a convenience store owner, burns down the restaurant across the road, then puts up a sign that says "only food for 200km". They are the only people providing a needed service, but it's hard to credit them with much of anything.

[yetanotheraoc]

Re: NBG

"So my mum spent an entire afternoon marking each image with NBJ in perfect painted calligraphy, and then took the pile to show her boss. She was then told that NBG was slang was No Bloody Good and all they wanted was her to dump them into the nearest skip"

Whew! So lucky they didn't want them, after she had painted them all with the wrong letters.

[J.G.Harston]

ARGH!!!

This really gets my goat, people using completely incorrect, misleading, or damaging terminology. The one that particularly annoy(s|ed) me was programs or instructors instructing users to "hit" the keyboard.

" Hit SPACE to continue "

# It's telling me to hit the SPACE key

* Go on then

# Are you sure?

* Yes, go one

# err....

SMASH!

# but (sob) you (sob) told me to!

When I was teaching and such software appeared, I would hunt it down and extinguishing it from all disks, write random data to the sectors, and then again just to make sure. How *DARE* you instruct my users to destroy our equipment. I'll come around and smash up your computer shall I?

[nintendoeats]

I suppose this probably comes from the days of typewriters, when a gentle press actually wouldn't be sufficient and you really did need to "hit" the key. So in that way, it's more like one of those weird things where the terminology from an old technology is applied to the new technology just to appeal to the existing user base.

The one that always gets me is the "bulb" exposure setting for a camera. OBVIOUSLY that means the shutter will stay open as long as you hold down the button. How could you NOT know that it refers to an air bladder that you could hold down to keep the shutter open in box cameras from the early 20th century. Not at all confusing when you get your shiny new camera and are trying to figure out how to get arbitrary exposure times.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nikon being a guilty offender - I've been idly wondering what that meant on my camera's control panel :)

[nintendoeats]

Another one, I work in machine vision where there is a lot of 3D data analysis going on these days. I've heard the phrase "3D pixel" used in earnest, which hurts my soul.

"You mean a voxel?

"No, it doesn't have a volume and it's not aligned to a grid."

"So it's not a cell then."

"No, so what?"

Fortunately I think that one has failed to catch on. We should call then Pixoints or something.

BIOS

Rewind

TTY

[John Brown (no body)]

Well, to be fair, even if the image is in 3D space rather than 2D space, it's still a Picture Element, ie a single point or "pixel" :-)

[nintendoeats]

A fair point, I always think of Pixel as "Pixture Cell". Nonetheless, I still don't like 3D pixel because it fucks with the distinction we have in 2D between raster and vector graphics. And in any case, we have a phrase for this in graphics already; vertex.

[Not Yb]

You do have a good point there.

[John Brown (no body)]

I saw what you did there!

Icon so I can give 2 thumbs up! ---------------->

[mirachu]

"Pic cell". Say it out loud.

[John Brown (no body)]

I was working with a guy just the other day. He's showing me a procedure on his laptop, He's bashing away at the touchpad for clicks and complaining about how poor it is. So after a demo, he lets me have a go. Moving the mouse and a quick tap on the touch pad for click worked perfectly for me every time. Also, as is common on many modern touchpads, it's actually what some call a clickpad in that the bottom left/right corners sit on switches. I still have no clue how he managed to make such a simple device fail to work reliably. I suspect he's frequently logging fault calls when the clickpad buttons fail. Some people are just ham-fisted by nature I guess.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my co-workers has a mouse that works fine for him, but not for anyone else, myself included. Bog-standard optical mouse. Has to be something with the way he holds it, possibly also related to his mousepad.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like dialing a phone? When was the last time you used a phone with a dial? I'm going to have to explain that to my kids...

[John Brown (no body)]

Is there an app that puts a rotatory dial on your smartphone screen for that retro experience? Then again, how many people actually memorise numbers so can "dial" them anyway?

[Sherrie Ludwig]

Of all the confusing icons

every mobile phone I have had has, as it's "make a telephone call" icon a picture of the handset of a desktop landline. How many adults have never held one of those "receivers"? Or even seen one, unless they watch old movies or tv shows?Yeah, I'm THAT old. ===>

[doublelayer]

Re: Of all the confusing icons

"How many adults have never held one of those "receivers"? Or even seen one,"

In developed countries, or at least where I grew up, everyone has seen one. I am old enough that I didn't have a mobile phone in my childhood, but young enough that I got one not much later. Even when I had one, lots of places still had old phones, especially offices and schools, where the children would see them and people using them. Likely schools which are never using the most advanced technology still have them. Everyone knows what those are. Older phones, like rotary dials or crank ringing devices, are not familiar, and fax machines would qualify, but landline receivers are common enough that they'll still be familiar. Maybe in another generation. This might be different in less developed countries where landline infrastructure wasn't well established, where mobile phones are a lot more common than landlines ever were.

[swm]

Re: Of all the confusing icons

At my college we had operators who would say, "Number please."

When they switched to dial (sic) telephones I had the pleasure of watching a full professor trying to dial a number, swearing, and not succeeding.

[Lil Endian]

J.G. you, er, don't mind me turning my PC on do you? :)

Should've used an IBM Model M, you can defo hit the keys on those. It took me about 20 minutes to kick the crap out of one of those once when I was having a tissy.

[Upvoted for your fantastic vehemence!]

[Eclectic Man]

Instructions and washing instructions

How about the instruction to "Hit any key", resulting in people apparently asking where the "Any" key is. Or in the days of floppy disks, being told to insert disk one, then insert disk 2, and then insert disk 3 without being told to remove the previously inserted disk?

The magazine New Scientist has a section at the back called feedback for the 'funnies'. One entry was a request for help from a puzzled scientist: the label on his flat sheet said "Wash inside out."

[Lil Endian]

Re: Instructions and washing instructions

"Hit any key" -- didn't Homer fall for that one?

As for "Try another disk" absolutely a true story I promise. I took the originating call, and saw the drive on the engineer's return!

Within a month, a different client called, had tried a diskette which failed read, and the disk wouldn't eject. Engineer goes to site, finds a 3.5" floppy in a 5.25" drive!!! How the feck did she get that in there?! Must've whacked it hard with something!

[waldo kitty]

Re: Instructions and washing instructions

How about the instruction to "Hit any key", resulting in people apparently asking where the "Any" key is.

yes! BTDT... left an entire (legal) office, one afternoon, after having been tasked to "fix this problem"... the fix? lovely gold rubbed stencil letters spelling "ANY" on each and every space bar in said office... i recall something like 50 systems in the typing pool area and i think on the order of 10 or 15 partners so yeah... 60-65 space bars proudly exclaiming they were (also) the "ANY key"... bosses never asked how i fixed the problem... they were just happy that we were not having to field numerous phone calls from them every day... especially since someone determined calls like those were "unbillable time spent"... that firm was one of our top clients for many years to follow, too... those were the glory days! LOL

[Eclectic Man]

Re: Instructions and washing instructions

One of my favourite possessions is an old style keyboard button, in bright red plastic labelled, in white capitals "PANIC".

[Not Yb]

Was just following instructions in the official recipe book for the deli for making a cheese tray: "Cut cheese into 1/4" cubes" Turns out apparently everyone knew that was way too small and cut them at a more normal cheese tray size. Silly me for actually reading and following instructions.

[Stuart Castle]

I used to work in a University computer lab. Every year, the final year students had to do a project that would take one year, and write a report that needed to be between 8 and 12 thousand words on it. As a computer science student myself, I was required to design a computer system or application, and write an 8,000 word report on the development... This project needed to be handed in at the courseworks office, with a printed and bound copy of the report that could also contain other media (such as a disc containing the the application) by 4pm on deadline day.

Of course, despite the lecturers continually reminding us to get as much as possible ready early, including printing the report, almost no one did. The practical result of this was that by 8am on deadline, even though we had at least one Laserjet 5si (Enterprise level network printer), the queue for each printer was already at least 3-4 hours. Of course, we technicians did get shouted at because our printers weren't fast enough, but the standard response was "You were warned, you should have printed earlier", even from Uni management.

The computers and printers were networked using a Novell Netware network. I'm not entirely sure what software used to manage the print jobs, but I * think* was Pcounter.

Whatever the software was, it gave the technicians in charge of each lab the ability to re-arrange the jobs on each queue manually. One day, my colleague, who I liked, but was arguably a BOFH and could be slightly scary if you didn't know him, decided he needed to print some stuff out urgently. That something turned out to be the Netware manuals. 2,000 pages of them. So, he found a PDF, printed it and bumped his own job up to the top of the queue. Thankfully, all our 5si's had several standard capacity paper drawers (one ream each) and a high capacity paper cabinet that could take a box of paper.

I don't remember what happened, but I suspect there were a lot of complaints.

I have to admit, I don't miss those days. Being the junior tech in the lab, I essentially spent all day (on that day of each academic year anyway) making sure all the printers were kept fed with paper, toner, maintence kits and ink (as appropriate), also making sure there were no paper jams. Babysitting the printers all day, to keep them running was incredibly boring.

[mmonroe]

Overflowing the burster

During 1980, I started my second job with a building society. This was back in the days when banks, etc had branches and actually cared about their customers. The society used to hand back some of its profit to depositors, and I was given the job of writing the code for the years run. There were rules based on how much the depositor had in their account, how long they had held an account, etc. The code had to check each account to see if it passed, calulate the amount to be paid back, which was a percentage of the pool based on rules, print certificates at 4 per 19x11 sheet of paper and produce the necessary deposit record. I had tested it thoroughly and it was ready to go as part of an overnight run. It was estimated there would be 12,000 eligible receivers. I arrived next morning to be greeted with "Can you please see operations and ask them to show you the burster?" (Remember bursters and decollaters?) Clearly there was lots more than 12,000 certificates, something like 150,000. The burster room was overflowing. My boss checked my code against the specification and it was correct. Whoever came up with the bonus rules stuffed up big time. I breathed a sigh of relief.

[UCAP]

Re: Overflowing the burster

This was back in the days when banks, etc had branches and actually cared about their customers.

Sorry, but I cannot believe there is an El Reg reader who is THAT old!

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Overflowing the burster

He is referring to the time banks at least pretended, that still is in living memory of some ancient El Reg readers.

[mikejames]

File this please...

Years ago in a previous job a PA was asked to file our new shiny Z80 assembler, supplied on a 5 1/4" floppy, in the project file. So she promptly put the disk into a binder hole punch and, after putting 2 holes in it, clipped it into a folder...

Luckily missing the edge of the rust.

[G.Y.]

IBM

When IBM tried their PC on a test audience, instructions said "take the diskette out of the envelope". Some of them took the round thing out of the square thing.

The instructions got rewritten

[Daedalus]

So much paper, so little time

The techno-kludges of the fanfold era were quite monumental. I remember pictures of large cabinets in which the paper hung as if to let the ink dry, there being some reason to not have it sitting in a stack.

And then - a miracle. Somebody realized that printing miles of paper for people to inspect for problems was a Really Bad Idea.

What was to be done? Answer: print out only the items that looked off. Yes! Exception processing!

Of course, competent programmers are more expensive than old fogies with reading glasses and those funny appliances to keep their shirt sleeves from getting ink on them. But once a problem gets big enough, even the most resistant corporate drone will shell out.

The problem is how big it has to get before the shelling out occurs.