#computer stories

TL;DR — I’m posting this because it made me smile, it’s so 2010s!

This is a photo I took back in 2013 when I worked in a computer shop and there was some “netbook craze” going on, well before the tablets made their appearance.

Needless to say, they were shit.

Windows XP run damn slow, you could barely surf the web and most people wanted to install things like the *whole* Office suite. Really? The best I can do is Notepad++

Linux? The average customer didn’t want Linux in the first place. You still wanted to try with Linux because you were a tech-savvy? Yeah, good luck with that, especially the network part: missing drivers for the cards and making one of those internet dongles was a pain in the ass.

Yet, we sold tons of this tiny evil machines. And tons ended up in the hands of some middle school kid because they were useless to the parents — but useful enough for MSN Messenger! — I honestly don’t remember if they could run decently any flash game…

2005, high school computer lab. School is out, three of us volunteered to help our computer programming teacher wipe some old computers for a project we’re doing. The wall is lined with tables and computers that we use everyday in class, with the old classic “Desktop sitting horizontal with big box CRT monitor on top”. The old computers we are reformatting are sitting on the floor.

One by one we are disconnecting the monitor and keyboard on the table and connecting them to the desktop sitting on the floor. Then we put the floppy disk into the computer on the floor, run a program off the disk (in the A: drive) to reformat the computer’s hard drive. The reformat program has a progress bar that moves across the screen, indicating the percentage finished. 

We have done two or three, it’s just a matter of waiting for each one to finish. We are just chatting about nerd stuff. One finishes and we swap it out for another. Because I’m so used to sitting at these computer stations and putting disks into the computer sitting on the table, I put the floppy disk into the wrong computer. I push it into the computer on the table that is not connected to anything. And the computer on the floor, which is connected to the monitor and keyboard has no disk in the drive. 

I type the command to access the A: drive. I type the command to run the fdisk.exe program on the disk in the A: drive (that is empty). The program starts. We see the progress bar on the screen. It is about 20% through the format when I notice that the floppy disk is inside the floppy drive of the computer on the table, and the drive of the computer actually hooked up is empty. 

The screen goes blank. I ask my friends, “did you see that?” They all agree. That was weird. The program WAS running. I re-enter the same commands. Access A: drive (cd A:), but now it says “error no disk”. We watched a computer access and run a program for a disk that was in a different computer up until the moment I noticed it. My two friends confirmed they saw the same thing.