Reply to post: Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

Are you sure you've got a floppy disk stuck in the drive? Or is it 100 lodged in the chassis?

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: One, OK, hundred, I have my doubts

If you think 100 floppies wouldn't fit in the chassis, you are too young to remember the early computer systems. It was about 200mm high, about 400mm wide, and about 600mm deep. A floppy disk was about 133mm x 133mm x 1.6mm. You could fit 169 floppies into an empty chassis, and in those days the chassis was mostly empty. You had a PSU, a graphics card, and a serial card, an FDD and (if you were lucky) an hdd, and usually nothing else. No heatsinks or fans. Oh, and the 1.6mm width was ... negotiable. They were easily compressed.

Something that was not published here was that (almost) everyone else's computer booted off a boot prom over an IPX network, and that the secretaries were given an HDD so that they could boot and work when the LAN was down (happened often - early 10base2 ethernet).

What was also left out is that only the PAs to senior managers got HDDs, and that, for security reasons, they were supposed to save local copies of all important files onto floppies that were locked in a special floppy lockbox that was then locked in their draws (not even close to my idea).

"Sheila" either assumed the disks were safe in the computer, or that the computer chassis was the lockbox. These were the days when we believed people would follow policies without having to be policed. She had never had reason to physically give the floppy disk to anyone before this.

As to secretaries being dumb - at the time this happened, PCs were nowhere near a common thing. I saved up for 2 years to buy my first IBM PC XT, and then spent about 5 days trying to figure out why it wouldn't turn on properly before realising I needed a DOS boot-disk. Not understanding even the most basic things about computers was not stupidity, it just was the way things were. The problem was people who felt their seniority and reputation would be diminished if they had to ask younger people for help or advice. "Sheila" liked to be thought of as senior and important, despite being a very nice person.

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