hippiegunnut • User • The Register Forums

Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced techie is indistinguishable from magic

Friday 14th August 2020 15:12 GMT hippiegunnut

Re: Reminds me a bit of the "More magic" switch story

I've actually done that and at about the end of the 80s. We had a hulking elderly printer - might even have been a daisywheel, it was a long time ago and my memory is hazy. It had an iffy power supply that took longer to come up to voltage that the control electronics allowed it and if you turned it on from cold it would always come up with an error condition. If however you turned it off and then back on again with exactly the right timing the capacitors in the PSU would retain the right amount of charge that it would come up and then work fine from then on. I had the knack and more than once I came across someone else trying and failing to get this thing to work by repeatedly turning it off and on and then I'd do it and up it came first try.

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The time a Commodore CDTV disc proved its worth as something other than a coaster

Friday 6th September 2019 09:14 GMT hippiegunnut

More common than you might think.

Many years ago I used to work for Compu$erve in the days when they were probably the most prolific supplier of magazine cover disks and their tech support was by a freephone number. The number one reason for connection problems was "You need a modem to connect" but "You need a computer" was far from unknown. Those ID10T level questions you have to go through every time you ring tech support? They're there for a reason. They solve 90% of calls.

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