Posts by Conrad Longmore 487 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2008
Lotus? DEC? CA? Can't remember who, but we did have a bunch of "one seat at a time" licences, put in a presentation box, multiple boxes were put in a larger box, all those boxes put on a pallet for a few hundred sheets of paper (when it could just have been *one* sheet).
Back in the days of on-prem Exchange we always struggled with mailbox quotas.. if somebody's mailbox filled up usually a quick and easy way to fix that was for IT to purge the deleted items. Safe enough, you'd think.
User: "Where are my emails?"
IT: "What emails?"
User: "The emails I had in Deleted Items."
IT: "We purged them to make space in your mailbox."
User: "You shouldn't have done that, I needed those emails!"
IT: "Why would you store emails you need in Deleted Items?"
User: "Because that's what we were told to do!"
IT: "Who told you to do that?"
User: <mumbles>
We never did find out who was giving out this epically bad advice, eventually the users learned it was a Very Bad Idea.
Back in the days of Y2K remediation I visited a branch facility where there was an 1980s-era Epson QX10 CP/M machine sitting proudly on top of the PABX, it had probably been powered on about 15 years previously and just worked. Decided it probably didn't even have a real time clock and left the damned thing alone. They also had a multiplexer for talking to the corporate mainframe which had been built BY HAND and paired with an identical multiplexer in the main office. Left that alone too. On the plus side, the staff canteen served beer and steak and kidney pies for lunch.
The Organisers and the clamshells that followed it were always the coolest gadgets about but I never managed to own one. A proper computer that sits in your pocket in the early 1990s? Who would have thought. It was disappointing when Psion basically walked away from all the cool stuff in 2000 and merged with Teklogix to become just another provider of industrial handhelds and basically consigned their innovation to the wastebin.
In my first job we had a special PC setup with a scanner. The way the desk was arranged meant that the monitor sat directly on the desk and not on the PC and was therefore a bit low to be used comfortably. An unused box file - one of the ones with a grey marbled cover - was brought into service to make the monitor a bit higher, and purely as a joke I printed out an enlarged icon of a 3.5" floppy drive and glued it onto the box. On more than one occasion people were observed trying to insert a disk into it.
Back in the old days, employees were allowed to smoke if they had their own office. Some of them smoked like a chimney, so the computer equipment would be coated inside and out with sticky nicotine residue which could not be cleaned off. Anything that came out of these offices had to be thrown away, if we ended up even touching the equipment we'd smell of cigarettes all day. Vile.
In my first job was in a college, my immediate predecessor was someone who believed that WD40 could fix anything... including computers. However it turns out that soaking the motherboard in WD40 does not - in fact - fix computers but he still persevered with his attempts until they got rid of him.
Also in that job, we had labs and labs of Amstrad PCs which had a light grey finish that really picked up the dirt from the rather grubby students. We didn't like these computers much, so we cleaned with with a bucket of warm water and some washing up liquid once a year. They were annoyingly resilient to this cleaning process and ended up looking sparkling.
The other problem was mouse balls.. we had to glue the belly doors close to stop the students removing the balls. However, the rollers would still clog up with body grease and skin particles (yummy) so the mice needed to be disassembled to be cleaned properly. This involved removing all the screws on the bottom, which of course would often go missing and then giving the rollers a good scrape. Thank goodness for optical mice these days..
My first job involved a lot of work using a Xerox 6085, it was a nice but clunky and eye-wateringly expensive system.The UI was not as intuitive as what Apple turned it into. It was still a helluva lot better than Windows 1 and 2 though.
Like 'em or not (and I'm not a fan), Apple can certainly make things usable. For example, smartphones didn't start with the iPhone but Apple married the capacitive screen with a fresh UI which made people not want to use the terrible clunkers running Microsoft or Symbian.
First job was in a college, they decided to roll out a lab connected to a NetWare server for teaching. It was quite neat, the coax cable ran through the trunking on the walls and then broke out and the coax went through the cable management system at the back of the desks, connected up the PCs and then went back into the trunking on the same double connector it came out of.
To give the lab more flexibility, there were several of these connectors in the lab which where unused unless we change the desk configuration. Here there was a tiny U-shaped cable from connector to connector. We discovered that the students found these fascinating and would unscrew them to see what they did. What they did was summon an angry technician. I did have to laugh because at the time I was running VAXes which were all connected by screwed-in 25-way D-type connectors just as God intended.
Back in the 90s I worked in academic IT at a college. As was the habit of the time IT, the Library and Media Services were lumped together and because the most senior manager in all of those was a librarian then she was given the role of managing all the services. She was lovely, but not technical in any way.
Generally speaking we were left to our own devices which was OK, but it did also feel directionless. We were quite interested to find out that the university we were a part of had decided to standardise on networking platforms. And we were told that it was either (Novell) NetWare or (Windows) NT and she couldn't quite remember, and were they the same thing or different?
I don't think I ever did find out. We just continued with NetWare.Incidentally, that was one of the things that drove me into the private sector where I first encountered Windows NT 4.0 which was primitive compared to NetWare..
Back in the very late 20th century, I worked in an IT office on the sixth floor which was near the top of the main building. We would set the computers up with the software they needed and then cart them to their new location. In this case, the employee had a shiny new Viglen 286 to replace their old Amstrad PC - we set it up, moved it to the second floor and not long after we got a phone call to say that it had crashed. We went back down, reset the machine and poked at in to hope the problem went away. It didn't. After several crashes, we re-installed the old computer and took the new one back upstairs for testing.
It worked perfectly, of course. But we knew the user wasn't making this stuff up, so we left it on soak test for an entire weekend and it was fine. So, we swapped the computers back around again and of course the new one crashed again not long after, and we were swapping them back again.
The faulty computer sat in the sixth floor office and worked perfectly. The old computer on the second floor was working perfectly too, so we didn't think that there was something wrong with the second floor. This seemed frustratingly illogical.
Eventually the reason was found - because of the clapped-out nature of the building's heating system the sixth floor was slightly cooler than the second floor. Although it seemed unlikely that this temperature difference would cause a problem, we found that introducing just a faint waft of warm air from a fan heater was enough to make the PC crash. Cause identified, the machine was repaired and the employee got to enjoy their super-speedy 286 once more.
Even in the face of iOS and Android devices, Symbian was still doing well although on many Nokia devices you'd be hard pushed to tell they were actually a smartphone. But in the long term, Symbian was written for tiny underpowered systems and newer smartphones were beasts running Unix.
What killed the platform was Stephen Elop's "Burning Platform" memo, which led to what was *meant* to be a gradual shift from Symbian to Windows. Customers dropped Symbian almost overnight because nobody likes a dead-end platform, sales dropped to a fraction of what they were and a bunch of quite interesting Nokia touchscreens got canned as a result. Symbian's swansong was the remarkable Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 and other late-model Symbian devices run Nokia Belle which was really quite nice. It's a shame really because the platform did still have a lot of life in it.
Of course we know how Nokia's dalliance with Windows turned out..
Remember in the bad old days when you'd try to read a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that someone had faxed you? That's where generative AI is going. Oh sure, there will be words you can actually read but no facts or analysis that you can actually trust.
Another analogy.. anyone remember AltaVista? AltaVista was great when it came out, you'd usually get the result you were looking for somewhere on the first page of results. In the pre-Google days, this thing was big traffic driver. But then people worked out how to game it through aggressive on-page SEO and then the output just became slop. It took Google to fix search that time around.
My first job was managing a VAX 11/750 at a college, DEC would sporadically send updates on half-inch tape. It took a couple of days to back up the system fully and apply the updates, so we did this during the summer holidays when nobody was around. The machine room was the ONLY place in the building with air conditioning (running at a chilly 16 degrees C) so we usually did the job on the very hottest day of the year so we could maximise the time in the blissful coolness.
When I started the operator console was a 300 baud DECwriter IV teletype/printer, we did upgrade that to a VT220 running as a glass teletype with the printer slaved to it. One of the main advantages of keeping the noisy old printer attached was that you could tell if something odd was going on if the printer was making a lot of noise (you could hear it in our office next door). That might be a very rare hardware or software failure, most often it was someone who had forgotten their password who was triggering events logged on the console. Who needs Splunk when you've got a DECwriter?
Back in the 90s I was working at a university, there was an office belonging to some affiliated organisation that we didn't really understand which we were apparently responsible for supporting.
One day I was in the office doing something or other, and the staff mentioned that they couldn't use one of the two computers in the office in the afternoon. I asked what they meant and they said it just didn't work, they seemed happy to have the afternoon off and I suspect they didn't do much work in the morning either.
Some further enquiries revealed that the computer would boot up into Windows 3.1 (yay) but they couldn't control the cursor. Worked OK in the morning, but on many (but not all) afternoons the mouse stopped working and the pointer wouldn't move.
Back in those days we couldn't Google stuff, but I did reach Jerry Pournelle's "Chaos Manor" in BYTE. Jerry had mentioned a similar problem, so I took the mouse apart and found the problem - this early opto-mechanical mouse didn't have a housing around the optical sensors. In the afternoon, sun came through the west-facing window onto the mouse and flooded the sensors. If it wasn't sunny, then the mouse would work.
Unlike today where most IT departments have a cupboard full of spare mice, we didn't and had to order one (I think it was about £25) and wait a couple of weeks. Installing the new mouse (with the internal housing) fixed the problem.
Weirdly, the users weren't happy about the fix. The whole organisation was shuttered a few years later, can't think why..
We've seen these guys.. they are really quick. User's mailbox gets hit by hundreds of email messages for things like web site sign-ups, newsletter subscriptions etc. Around 10-20 mins after the email bomb starts, the user gets a call via Teams from a fake IT department. You might see several victims getting the email bomb with only a few getting the phone call, worth checking in each case.
Back in the day when overdrive processors were a thing, we had a user who tried to install a clock-doubled CPU onto his motherboard, paid for with his own money. The problem was that it already had a clock-doubled CPU out of the factory, so this didn't do anything. In order to try to wring some extra performance out of the computer he started fiddling with things on the motherboard, and decided it would be a terrific idea to remove all the jumpers. Unsurprisingly, the computer did not work at all after that.
Deciding it was now an IT support problem, we got a phone call. We found the computer with all the jumpers in a little pile next to it. User demanded we fix it, we refused since without knowing the correct settings it would have been near impossible. User was very cross. We walked away.
Overnight the cleaner came into the office where the computer was, found all the jumpers binned them. I don't think anyone ever did get the computer working again.
I wrote one myself once, thinking "how hard can it be". Turned out that a VT52 emulator running on a BBC Micro and written in BASIC was only good enough to cope with 300 baud data. Which was fine.
Because this makes me an expert, I will say that it was always tough to do on early hardware. 132 columns? Errr.. not quite. Come up with a way to sensibly map the LK201 keyboard to a PC? We'll give it a go.. what's a COMPOSE key anyway? I thought using a VT520 was a treat.. multisession, copy and paste *between* sessions, fitted on the desk easily and had no moving parts.
There were certainly problems, but well-prepared organisations fixed them quickly - byzantine mainframe applications being a particularly tricky thing.
I think the odd thing was that orgs tended not to 'fess up to problems. The narrative after 2000 rolled in was that *nothing* happened, I think there was some reluctance for orgs to put their hands up and say "well actually we had these issues" because it may have made them look under-prepared. The "nothing happened" narrative rolled on, and now of course there are those who claim there was never a bug to fix..
Most of the examples I see are *not* romance scams, but they do involve a supposedly random person striking up a long-term friendship with the mark. The initial contact is made to look like it's a fluke.. somebody reaches out to you on WhatsApp and asks "Are you the wombat doctor?" to which you reply "No, but I *love* wombats!" which of course the bad actor already knows - and then they very slowly reel you in.
I do agree that "pig butchering" is a pretty horrible phrase, but it does differentiate it from other types of scams including *actual* romance scams (which are typically West African in origin, rather than East Asian pig butchering). Some other phrase would be better, doesn't even have to be accurate I suppose.. BEC (businesses email compromise) fraud often involves no compromise, or even email.
I ran training course for people new the the internet in the pre-Google days. The Yahoo! Directory and AltaVista were the two main weapons of choice, but it was also very common for sites to have hotlinks pages to other related sites. ODP / DMOZ came a little bit later, but in the pre-Wikipedia days that was the best way to get a neutral overview of a topic. All these interlinks are of course what enabled the PageRank algorithm for Google.
It looks like I'm not alone.. on several occasions in the distant past I had the same problem, employees storing important emails in the Deleted Items folder in Exchange, which of course is the sort of thing you purge first when their measly on-prem mailbox quota was exceeded. They had apparently been "told" to do it, but when pressed they couldn't say by whom or why. My guess is that they didn't know how to create their own folders. They didn't like it when I asked if they kept all their important paper files in the physical waste bin either. "Of course not, why would I do that?"
I'm glad I don't work in user support any more..
Had exactly the same thing, the user couldn't work in the afternoon in winter when the sun came through the window and shone on the desk. I knew what the problem was because I had read about it in Chaos Manor in Byte some time before - for the uninitiated, Chaos Manor was Jerry Pournelle messing around with computers and it was a surprisingly useful source of tips. I replaced the mouse, so the user could work in the afternoon which I think they were none too happy about.. they also had a (for the time) massive 21" colour CRT running in VGA-only mode which looked stupid. After checking that they weren't visually impared, I installed the correct Windows 3.1 SVGA driver and set it to something more appropriate. They made a formal complaint, and I had to set it back to 640 x 480. I honestly don't think that office actually did any work at all...
Years ago when I was working (mostly) desktop support, facilities wouldn't allow IT to have a trolley because we might break something by bumping into it. So we had to carry everything ourselves, back in the day when desktops, printers and of course servers could be massive. LaserJet IIISi printers were a favourite at over 40kg each. Apparently IT staff were more expendable that the doors and furniture.
That would be the Labour government in 2000 acting on recommendations laid down under the Tories. It did rely on the findings of the Nolan report being implemented in order to ensure that people in public office behaved themselves. I guess that didn't work so well in the long term...
Does outsourcing ever work? Many moons ago I was a county councillor, the ruling Tories pushed through an outsourcing program based more on ideology than any real need. It was a disaster, the contractors messed almost everything up and were in breach of contract. Even so, the council ended paying a considerable wedge to the contractors for them to go away.
It was always obvious to almost all the non-Tory councillors that it would be a disaster. Back in those days the personal surchage still existed where cllrs could be personally liable for negligence. We made sure that every single vote was recorded...
Of course the Germans had telephones too, but in occupied Europe the resistance would keep cutting the lines. This forced the Germans to use radio while the lines were repaired. The Germans thought it was just an annoyance, they didn't understand that they were exposing their communications.
As the Germans were pushed back inside their own borders, then they tended to switch to telephone and teleprinters which meant that the intelligence dried up. This is one of the reasons that the Germans achieved surprise at the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45.
Aye, and it was those mundane reports which could often provide a crib for decrypting the cypher. Some stations sent the same message every day (e.g. "NOTHING TO REPORT HH") - if you knew the message then it's much quicker to find the rotor and plug settings. So in a way, over-use made it weaker.
Indeed, our efficient fighter control was a force multiplier. We could get our fighters to where they needed to be more often, we could prioritise high risk attacks and we knew exactly what resources were available at any one time. All the available data for the battle area effectively got pumped into one location and could be analysed and acted upon.
Like a 1940s version of Splunk..
Back in the day when most games ran in DOS mode 13h I worked at a college, I wrote a small TSR that simply intercepted the requests to change graphics mode and if it was 13h the computer threw a generic error and then rebooted. I named it something generic and stuffed it in the DOS folder. I don't believe any of the students figured out how it was done.
I also wrote a wrapper around the FORMAT command because students - either accidentally or deliberately - would do a FORMAT C: which of course would render the machine unusable. If they tried that then it would make the most ghastly alarm noise in the middle of their class and earn them a bollocking.
