I used to go to Fry's Electronics computer department and screenshot the desktop with clickable stuff, then proceed to set that as the background and close all the windows and remove or relocate all desktop items. To an end user, it then seemed like the computer was frozen or otherwise fubar'd. Rinsed and repeated that for a whole row of machines a few times. It was entertaining to then watch people approach and try to interact with them.
I know this is weak kung-fu compared to many stories in this thread is but it was a good time! (at the time..)
This reminds me of an incredible moment in my career. Circa 2010 or 2011 I was working at a small agency in LA where we could more or less all fit in one big office. My boss (the owner) and a UX contractor were whiteboarding some flows for a new project under tight deadline. It was the classic scene, scribbles all over the place, post-it note's everywhere, coffee-stained printouts stuck to the whiteboard with little magnets, etc.
Eventually the commotion of their whiteboarding session became very quiet and they returned to their computers to hunker down. Our UX contractor was twiddling some magnets in his hands, clicking them together and unclicking them, while starting at his screen and chewing through the design problem.
A few moments later, a pretty loud scratching noise started. Peter, the UX guy, started to start up at the white drop-panel ceiling with a concerned look, "I think there might be a rodent in the ceiling"
I knew this sound almost right away, and could also tell it was coming from directly in front of him, not the ceiling. PETER! GET THE MAGNETS OFF YOUR LAPTOP!
He had inadvertently stuck them to the palm rest, directly above the spinning rust drive that was still standard for this time period. The machine quickly became unstable and then stopped booting. Poor guy was in the Apple store for the rest of the day.
Hilarious in hindsight, but a lot of work was lost that day. I still remember seeing poor Pete staring up quizzically at the ceiling while the entire contents of his HDD got vaporized.
I remember reading that story. IIRC, the bug was was that long running jobs would fail. They eventually traced it to electrical interference generated by a loose floor panel that would move when the user paced over it. Also can't find the link though :(
And I'll add that it drove me nuts to see random, popcorn-like activity amongst the tiles.
I kept trying to find "control panel" to add a second monitor, for example, but one of those tiles spontaneously showed me a video of an fscking carnival in Rio!
Then, another flashed a bikini babe in Miami.
Then, another flashed a severe weather warning on another continent...
It was like being in the control room of a news station! Pretty like a Christmas tree or fireworks, but *first I have to help my girlfriend set up her computer to write her dissertation."
Ah yes, I almost forgot about the POST bleep bloops, and the clickedy click of the HDD actuator... or if you go back far enough the crunching of a 3.5in floppy - though to be fair that was sometimes more anxiety inducing (not the most reliable medium).
In one of the books I got on technology (early '00s?) there was an anecdote about a computer at a military facility crashing each night (probably in the 70s or 80s). They brought in a consultant to look at it and after an extended period of time looking for the problem in the code, the consultant was staying late in the data center wracking his brain over the problem.
At 10pm, a janitor came in, unplugged the computer, and plugged in his floor clearer, cleaned the floor, and then when done, unplugged the floor cleaner, and plugged the computer back in.
The consultant then suggested using the outlet on the other wall that had a free outlet (and got a 'difficult to unplug' cover for the outlet with the computer).
The next night he stayed late again and the janitor used the outlet on the other wall.
The consultant then told management that the problem had been solved and it was a buffer problem.
recalls me of the time where at office the LCD screens would sometimes turn off, at seemingly random locations. it took a long time for people to realise movement caused it, then further time to discover it was when the chair would pump when they stood up.
“I remember being a bit nervous on the first visit. Not because I thought I was doing anything wrong, or because I was worried about getting "caught".It was more like stage fright. ”
“Sometimes I would open another tab and load Flickr or Open Processing so I had an excuse if someone asked why I was comparing every single computer.”
Ah, this brings back memories of a fried getting hold of some pixelated gifs and bringing them in on a 3.5" floppy, the anticipation as we copied them over in the lab, then the mixed excitement and disappointment on trying to load them up at home and finding out half of the files were corrupted, followed by in-hindsight-amusing panic on the discovery of the Recent Documents list. :D
Many of the readers will know of that event, narrated at least in "Absolute Zero Gravity", of the malfunctioning mainframe. One day, as a technician was making diagnostic about why the machine regularly crashed around that time, a janitor entered, saluted politely, unplugged the server, plugged a vacuum cleaner and went on with his routine.
Some of us have personally witnessed cleaning personnel torture equipment, ignoring with force and determination the signals that machines gave while violently stroking the area of the cables.
Oh, and this friend of mine, only days ago, found that a cleaning lady disconnected, to connect some appliance... an incubator. A whole aviary batch - all dead.
This just brought me back to HS and doing this on all the computer lab C64's (usually contained 3/4 of the way into some Basic program...) After a few weeks of this, there was a nice note posted to each monitor to kindly refrain from killing the machines...
Yep, I remember it well... it’s weird that it took so long for people to realize that the solution was to decouple the two with a short n-way idc cable...
It was the motion of pressing down on the keyboard (or otherwise moving it) that caused the two rigid bodies (computer and ram pack) to momentarily lose contact, and boom - bye bye work...
My first job in the early '80's was for a phototypesetter manufacturer. Logically, the NSA had one of our machines for in-house use. Whenever there was a issue with the machine I flew up to Virginia to look at it. My experience was roughly the same as the article's, super-nice people, all of us immediately on a first name (only) basis. The two kind of uniquely funny things about those visits was 1) that the machine (PDP-11 based) was kept in a small room with nothing in else it - a door opened into a room with the machine exactly in the center of the space. The other thing 2) which did make sense was the the core memory was always wiped w/a walking 1's and 0's paper-tape utility prior to me getting access to it.
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