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11 minutes ago, skinner75 said:

I've been in IT support for 25+ years - this gave me a chuckle!:
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We had a Commodore Pet.

Commodore PET 2001 computer

I remember someone spending ages typing attempts at commanding the cassette player to open, being given 'helpful' hints like, try 'eject tape', try 'cassette eject', try 'eject cassette', maybe Americans spell cassette as casset, or with two Ts, etc..?

After about ten minutes of failure, someone gave up and lifted the lid for him.

He may also have been the person who was told to 'Press any key to start' and then spent ages reading every key before announcing that he couldn't find the 'Any' key.

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Customers who folded 8" floppies over and rammed them into 5" floppy drive slots!!!

Or the customer who posted 8" data floppy discs back to support for analysis by folding them over so they would fit in a 1/3 A4 envelope and stapled a with complements clip to the folded disc.!!! Strange but true.

A mouse once got inside a customers Pertec 6m removable hard disc drive which caused it to head crash, phoned support and asked if they should use the Super Cat utility 'sprcat' to try and read the disc!!!

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We had one of these.

GEC 4000 Computer - Computer - Computing History

Idiot MD bounded into the room and thumped the big grey box by the door "How many megabytes in there, then?" - "Bloody loads, mate, that's a filing cabinet. The computer's over there, with the pretty lights on. Best not to punch it, though".

Our Japanese bloke hand-drew a graph to convince 'them' to do something. They wanted 'better evidence', than what they considered to be merely his opinion, so he got the machine to print out the graph, using the same figures. This turned into into a 'computer prediction' and it became totally true.

We had a rudimentary speech synthesiser. You could type things in and it would attempt to say them, but many things needed to be spelled in a way that would give you the right sound. We rigged it up to ask you to type your name, then it would just say "Go away, (name)", except it didn't really say 'Go away' quite so politely. A lot of names would fail to be said correctly, Geoff, David, etc, but Barry would work, and our Barry was a real technophobe. So we persuaded him to do it. He was so offended that he refused to go back in the room until it said "Sorry, Barry" whilst he stood in the doorway.

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On 10/11/2022 at 5:09 PM, Broithe said:

When the Mark 4s appear, will these ones be cheaper for not having a speaker fitment?

 

Quiet...ER?

A Tara Mines train with loose wheels, clanking 071 bits, and carrying marbles, while tumbling down a tin staircase in an echo chamber fitted with Electric Picnic amplifiers, while the driver is roaring his head off into a karaoke machine turned up full, would be quieter than many carriage on some trains.....

Try a Howth Dart on a sunny Saturday, or a stag-from-drimnagh and hens-from-rathkeale express to Killarney on a Saturday.......

So, "quieter" than WHAT, exactly?

Edited by jhb171achill
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6 hours ago, Broithe said:

We had one of these.

GEC 4000 Computer - Computer - Computing History

Idiot MD bounded into the room and thumped the big grey box by the door "How many megabytes in there, then?" - "Bloody loads, mate, that's a filing cabinet. The computer's over there, with the pretty lights on. Best not to punch it, though".

Our Japanese bloke hand-drew a graph to convince 'them' to do something. They wanted 'better evidence', than what they considered to be merely his opinion, so he got the machine to print out the graph, using the same figures. This turned into into a 'computer prediction' and it became totally true.

We had a rudimentary speech synthesiser. You could type things in and it would attempt to say them, but many things needed to be spelled in a way that would give you the right sound. We rigged it up to ask you to type your name, then it would just say "Go away, (name)", except it didn't really say 'Go away' quite so politely. A lot of names would fail to be said correctly, Geoff, David, etc, but Barry would work, and our Barry was a real technophobe. So we persuaded him to do it. He was so offended that he refused to go back in the room until it said "Sorry, Barry" whilst he stood in the doorway.

My first introduction to IT was during the late 70s when our company 'outsourced" our book-keeping to a business that had a Main-Frame computer as our business expanded.

Previously among other duties I maintained the sales and expenses ledgers manually entering and coding invoices and payments in a big Kalamazoo Ledger, my job was now to approve and code the invoices for data entry on a paper form stapled to each invoice.

Our provider sent out a "technical advisor' to our office after some unexpected glitches in the first data entry run and our "advisor" literally could not believe my working conditions in a site office on a busy construction project and he never came back again or heard of further problems with the standard of my coding. I usually carried out data entry or invoice coding in the quite and comfort of a show home or a back-office.

We later took on a full time book-keeper and I shifted to a purely managerial and technical role and no longer had to code invoices

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On 18/7/2023 at 7:12 PM, Broithe said:

We had one of these.

GEC 4000 Computer - Computer - Computing History

Idiot MD bounded into the room and thumped the big grey box by the door "How many megabytes in there, then?" - "Bloody loads, mate, that's a filing cabinet. The computer's over there, with the pretty lights on. Best not to punch it, though".

Our Japanese bloke hand-drew a graph to convince 'them' to do something. They wanted 'better evidence', than what they considered to be merely his opinion, so he got the machine to print out the graph, using the same figures. This turned into into a 'computer prediction' and it became totally true.

We had a rudimentary speech synthesiser. You could type things in and it would attempt to say them, but many things needed to be spelled in a way that would give you the right sound. We rigged it up to ask you to type your name, then it would just say "Go away, (name)", except it didn't really say 'Go away' quite so politely. A lot of names would fail to be said correctly, Geoff, David, etc, but Barry would work, and our Barry was a real technophobe. So we persuaded him to do it. He was so offended that he refused to go back in the room until it said "Sorry, Barry" whilst he stood in the doorway.

SORRY BARRY

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Talking of speech synthesisers, reminds me of the one that was used on the underground trains at Atlanta Airport, announcing the terminals.   And since it sounded like HAL that's what locals called it. We miss HAL the trip is not the same anymore.

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36 minutes ago, Ironroad said:

Talking of speech synthesisers, reminds me of the one that was used on the underground trains at Atlanta Airport, announcing the terminals.   And since it sounded like HAL that's what locals called it. We miss HAL the trip is not the same anymore.

I once spent a productive 15 minutes with a new 'train manager' on a Heuston/Cork train. Being of a southern African origin, such places as Thurles and Cloughjordan were not phonetically obvious to him from the paperwork, as he read out the pre-stop announcements.

Trying to locate a place near Lough Derg yesterday, the sat-nav woman from the driver's phone kept referring to Nenagh like a toddler impersonating a cop car - Neeee-Naaah.

Edited by Broithe
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