- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
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One of my favorite examples of the difficulty in idiot-proofing things comes from a national park ranger talking about the difficulty of designing a bear-proof garbage can. He said “There is considerable overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.”
Lmao, yeah… You can make a can so secured a bear definitely won’t get in; but will people go to the effort to use it then?
Definitely some overlap there.
And I think that hits on the truth, which makes this less “iamverysmart”. It’s not that the tourists are dumb, it’s that they’re new and not willing to pay much attention to things like trash can design. 1% of a normal person’s attention presents a lot like a really dumb person.
Is it 1%? Maybe when they first try to open it they’re distracted But when doesn’t open and now they’re concentrating on the problem and still fail, then we have to kinda own up to the fact that a lot of people aren’t smarter than a bear.
I can’t believe this comment chain is this long and no one has pointed out that drunk and stoned humans are terrible at figuring stuff like this out.
You’re not planning for the dumbest human trying in earnest. You’re planning for humans who are tired, distracted and/or chemically altered. A 80 IQ person can figure out a weird trash can eventually if they are trying.
These comments (not just yours) feel misanthropic. I haven’t been to a campsite in ages so I don’t know what sort of trash can puzzlebox we’re talking about, but I work somewhere with alcohol so I can guess what the true issue is.
I’d be pretty distracted by the bear waiting behind me for his go.
I think if they can score 100 on an IQ test, they can figure out any reasonable trash can eventually, assuming the moving parts are visible. Many people would rather just litter.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that, but otherwise, sure
Yup. The ranger did say “stupidest”, I guess, but I feel like at 70 or something you still know to pull on stuff in a few set ways until it moves.
And bears around 130 probably know that too.
100 is the average, implying half the population is lower than that
At the risk of pedantry, if 100 is the average (the mean), we’re saying “most people are at 100”. If it were the median, then we’re implying “100 is the middle score of those sampled”. A subtle, but important difference.
i’m not really sure what IQ has to do with this. it was originally designed to measure people’s proficiency in school. it was not designed to be a general measure of intelligence. that was something that was co opted by eugenicists.
here’s a quote from Simon Bidet, the original creator of the IQ test, about his thoughts on the eugenicists using his test:
Finally, when Binet did become aware of the “foreign ideas being grafted on his instrument” he condemned those who with ‘brutal pessimism’ and ‘deplorable verdicts’ were promoting the concept of intelligence as a single, unitary construct.
you can read more about this stuff on his wikipedia page. (the quote is from wikipedia)
even to this day, there is quite a bit of doubt as to how accurately IQ measures “general intelligence”
I know. It’s a shorthand quantitative measure everyone’s familiar with, though, so it’s useful for communicating. Thanks for adding a disclaimer for me.
Yah, that’s possible too. But I can’t say I’d figure anyone that litters is much smarter than a bear either.
Ecology (or just waste management) is even more complicated and boring than a garbage can.
It’s apathy all the way down.
A bear has time and motivation to keep trying over and over again to get into the garbage. People are generally much less determined to figure it out.
I used to see people charitably, much like you do, until very recently. After witnessing for myself people staring into the sun and injuring themselves after being repeatedly warned, I now realize there are a substantial number of people who simply have rocks clattering around inside their skulls instead of brains
I genuinely had someone stop and ask me why you can’t see the moon during an eclipse because “it’s got light in it right”.
They’re soon to replace our HR manager.
Answer: Light travels in straight lines (well, for this purpose) and the moon is roughly an opaque sphere. Maybe you could see it with earthshine, but I get the impression the corona is still much brighter.
I’ve heard dumber.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
A solar or lunar eclipse?
The solar eclipse from Monday.
Holy shit this. And not even “educated” people. Where I work is about half degree holding engineers… many of these engineers were seen outside staring at the partial eclipse Monday.
Sounds like your typical engineer. I passed fluid dynamics, I deserve to look at the big ball of plasma.
My eyes haven’t hurt this bad since studying for differential equations theory… Have I told you I’m an engineer?
“Pfff I have a master’s degree I know what I’m doing”
There was a solar eclipse when I was in grade six. One of my classmates was riding his bike home, and was stupidly looking at the eclipse, and got hit by a car. The irony.
So you’re somewhere between 18 and 58 than
Ladies and gentlemen, we gottem.
Omg that’s so messed up but so incredible haha, was he okay after?
It was pretty bad. He missed a lot of school. I think he ended up repeating grade six. I never saw him much after that, but I did hear that he got married to another person I went to school with eventually, so presumably his life wasn’t ruined or anything.
I’m curious if he was okay before.
What do you mean? Sun is blocked = no sun rays = not blinded when staring directly. The logic is sound! Just like in programming.
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Eclipses happen every year like clockwork (it basically is clockwork, but on a huge scale). Eclipse seasons are spring and fall, around the equinoxes. You could very easily fly to see a total eclipse every few years if you want to, because we know when they are going to happen and where will have totality - it’s very routine stuff. There’s literally nothing special at all about the one that just happened, except that a lot of people haven’t seen one before because it hasn’t happened -at that location- in a time.
So no, absolutely not something you’ll never get a chance to see again, tho you won’t be able if you go blind like a fucking moron.
Being able to see properly is also something they’ll never be able to do again, so, I hope that one second was “spiritual” enough for them lol
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Being able to see properly
immediately go blind
You’re immediately taking the argument to the extreme. You won’t immediately go blind, but it will damage your retina in ways you sometimes don’t notice because the brain compensates for it. It happened to my uncle when he was a welder, he had a second blind spot where he couldn’t see sharply, but it didn’t really affect his quality of life.
There’s a pretty big difference between temporary pain and permanent damage though.
Unless you royally fuck up walking on coals you get some pain, fuck up a little and you just get some blisters.
If I had someone run through hot coals I would scold them, sure. Much like for being angry about others not believing in zombie carpenters or letting quacks give their kids overpriced sugar pills. But that’s jot the context right now, is it?
Congratulations! You’ve leveled up in the game of life.
I’ve seen people carelessly throw away their garbage right next to garbage bins, because they couldn’t be bothered to get a little closer or aim.
The bear has more determination, because it has an incentive to get to the tasty, high calorie food that doesn’t require the energy expenditure of chasing it down and tearing it apart. Throwing away garbage into a designated container on the other hand is a chore that some people believe they can skip, because they are the sole protagonists in their own stupid little world.
Can you put your computer in a bear proof garbage can?
You could, but who is worried a bear will use their computer?
The QA engineer obviously.
The monitor disappeared rather than the computer, but we can assume the tower somewhere under the desk did as well. But what of the keyboard? It’s in the icon, yet remains after deletion!
I think you found a bug. Either the keyboard is not compatible with the bin or we have a immutable peripheral and we should consider containment.
SCP should be able to secure the keyboard anomaly
Retired gif or inspired gif
Yes.
One of the things I like most about my customer-facing technical role is that users find the craziest bugs. My favorite is a bug in a chat program that would keep channels from rendering and crash the client. The only clue I got was “it seems to be affecting channels used by HR more than other departments, but it’s spreading.”
Turns out the rendering engine couldn’t handle a post that was an emoji followed by a newline and then another emoji. So when the HR team posted this, meaning “hair on fire” it broke things:
🔥 😬Gotta love user reported bugs. I had one that reported a product of ours crashed only on Mondays. We spent a total of 5 minutes thinking of a cause and appointed customer support for a Friday morning. Lo and behold the app still crashed.
In this case the app only crashed on Mondays… because that’s when this user actually used the application
Before we had mindblown emoji, we had this.
💥 😳Before that we had ‽:-)
User reported bugs can be wild. I had one where the user was tapping a button repeatedly so fast that the UI was not keeping up with the code and would no longer sync certain values properly. I’m talking like tap the button 15 times in a second. Another issue involved flipping back and forth between the same page like 10 times then turn the device Bluetooth off and immediately back on.
Why the fuck are your users flipping a page back and forth 10 times. I understand the Bluetooth bit, they wanted it to restart probably from a device not showing up. Also what was the issue
I can’t remember what the exact issue was that was produced by those steps. I want to say it was some sort of visual bug where parts of the page wouldn’t load. I do know that it only happened if you toggled Bluetooth within seconds of flipping the pages so many times. I honestly have no idea why the user decided to change pages so many times. You could take a little bit of time changing the pages, so maybe they kept viewing a page and backed out only to want to view the page again?
Why would you post this, my phone exploded and took a shit. I didnt know it could do that.
Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.
Don’t worry, I had a bit too much to drink last night so it’s covered
I did actually find a very similliar bug in the experimental rendering engine of element (the matrix client). So yes, this is something that exists somewhere else too.
The act of someone sitting at a brand new Mac, with a never-before-used interface, and immediately clicking the computer icon to drag it to the trash, is such a powerful image for me.
The statement of, “this is what I think of this computer” is so strong, because I have to believe that whomever did that must have been a tech person to be at the event; but perhaps they just thought it was a shortcut and didn’t like shortcuts on their desktop so they tried to remove it? Like, you can do this with Windows… Because the computer object (in Explorer) is immutable, and any reference to it is simply a link to that object.
I prefer the thought of them just being like “this computer is trash” and doing that, and causing the system to crash.
Moments like that are why I belive in timetravel, in the real timeline it took two years to find that bug and it was resolved quietly but of course someone is going to come back and troll them by doing it on day 1.
why would it take 2 years to find a bug? release something new to the public and it will always take seconds
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“I put the computer in the trash” is pretty easy to replicate.
I think it’s more like they thought they were supposed to do that. I’m guessing they had no idea what to do, and putting an object in trash or recycle is something everyone understands, so that’s what their brain told them to do.
“okay… What happens if I do this?”
That one is a ‘whoever’ btw.
Okay, but can you explain why?
Whoever is the subject of the verb “did”. Whoever did something.
Whomever is an object, so whoever did something to whomever.
In other words, “whoever” does things; “whomever” has things done to them.
As a programmer, I consider The User to be the enemy. No matter how thoroughly I seemingly test my code, the second the user gets their hands on it, it breaks left and right from all the crazy shit they do.
I was a QA engineer. I think one of the guys on the team I was on developed a stress response from hearing me walk over to his desk.
Lots of “page crashes if the user doesn’t have a last name”
“Why wouldn’t they have a last name??”
“No idea, but 372 users in the DB don’t, and 20 of them were created this month so it’s not an old problem”
“incoherent muttering and cursing”
Because I have been completely unable to find it again and this seems like a relevant place to ask: does anyone have a link to an article similar to this, that I believe might have been titled ‘My First Name is My Last Name’? This is made extra hard to look up because I’ve forgotten the specific culture and details it’s talking about, but it’s about the same basic issue with cultural conventions on names.
I used to work with a Greek guy called Argyros Argyros - cool guy, but suspect he was an outlier. Named after his dad, so certainly some people are named that way. Icelandic for instance would traditionally use “Given Name” “Patronym from father” - Magnus Magnusson was quite famous in the UK; Björk Guðmundsdóttir might be the most famous internationally, but she’s not a “double”. There’s quite a few cultures - Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, … - that write their names as “Family Name” “Given Name” as opposed to the other way around, if that’s what you mean?
Apologies for being so sketchy on the details but I really can’t remember too many of the specifics. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t that his family name came first, because that’s fairly straightforward. I think the author might have been from an east or southeast Asian culture? I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name. I don’t want to keep guessing on more details about how the naming conventions were different because I’m probably going to get it wrong, I have fairly low confidence in what I remember from it.
I think that part of the essay might have been about how addressing him as Mr. Firstname is actually more formal than Mr. Lastname, even though Firstname is not his family name
Could it be Turkish? Just stumbled on this section on the Wikipedia article on mononyms
Surnames were introduced in Turkey only after World War I, by the country’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as part of his Westernization and modernization programs. Common people can be addressed semi-formally by their given name plus the title Bey or Hanım (without surname), whereas politicians are often known by surname only (Ecevit, Demirel).
I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.
Some cultures don’t use last names.
It’s pretty common https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononym
my users are not allowed to be mononym
UPDATE User SET Last name=‘Solo’ WHERE LastName=‘’;
You can thank Disney for that one.
As a user, I sometimes do everything I can to see what breaks a system. (Often unintentionally)
Then, I don’t do those this things.
(Learning permissions on Linux was a great way to destroy a system. Eg “sudo chown -R user:user /” didn’t work as I first thought)
Ha, I’ve done the same thing
Let me guess; does it recursively remove all permissions from the file system?
The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.
On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.
Recursively changes ownership of all files to the user, which breaks tons of system processes
“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.
I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).
The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.
What the fuck was going on?
In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.
This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.
Id hardly call that a user fucking things up, that’s not even good on paper. Those are a retarded pair of things to have next to one another regardless of any coloring on them. Especially with the same handles
I’m not a fighter pilot, but when I think “ejection”, can’t imagine anything but a high-stress situation where the pilot doesn’t have time to figure out which is the ejection lever. Imagine a real emergency where the pilot grabs the wrong lever, gently slides back with the seat, and then fucking dies on impact.
“Gently slides back” 😂
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
That’s a very funny anecdote about Apple that I can find no evidence of ever actually happening. Leaving aside the fact that Xerox had GUI, including the modern WIMP GUI we’re all familiar with today, in 1974. The Apple Lisa was released at least a year before the Macintosh 128K came out in 1984. As much as I love the idea of Apple making such an amateur mistake, I’m going to need a reputable source before I believe that story actually happened.
Edit: I’m seeing a lot of “it’s technically possible” but still no sources to confirm that it actually occurred. Until a a verifiable source emerges, I’m still going to assume this story never actually happened. Anyone have Woz’s contact info? We could always just ask him.
I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.
It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.
Speaking from experience, it functionally ruined them, at least the early macs -exact os/model unknown- we had (school computers well behind the curve and all). They’d need to be reformatted after. It would delete, then iirc just crash and you’d reboot into errors (my memory of this is spotty, it was a very long time ago)
I used to do that in the computer lab when I was supposed to be doing typing practice. Fucking hate typing “properly”.
Note: I am not a verifiable source, this is anecdata.
Maybe you had ones with built-in hard drives which, if ejected unexpectedly, may have caused problems on early Macs.
But there was and still is no “computer” icon on the Mac OS desktop, and dragging a disk to the trash just ejects it.
Seconded.
I’ve read most of folklore.org and do not recall any such story. In fact, how do you even “drag the computer to the waste basket” as the first/only icon would be the System floppy and afaik they’ve never had / still don’t have a “computer icon”. 🤔
First image I could find of the desktop and there is computer icons right there.
If dragging one of those to wastebasket at the bottom right crashed the computer, it would fit the description of the event.
I wonder if the first attempt was simply dragging that Mac System Software to the trash. Not “the computer icon”, but it’s possible the anecdote was/is slightly misremembered by John
Seems like a simple folley, the person I responded to said it was a floppy (it’s two layers of “mesh”?) and couldn’t remember the computer icons. Details get fuzzy, I had no idea and was curious so I just looked it up. I’ve got no horse here.
Dragging a floppy to the bin would simply eject it… 🤷 Well all right, maybe the story is from before the intro of the “Insert disk Foo”.
The point of the trash was that nothing happened until you emptied it. And the OS was loaded into memory so you could eject the OS disk so it wasn’t actively using those files. I don’t think even dragging System to the trash and emptying it would have done anything except prevent you from booting with that System disk.
You honestly couldn’t pay me enough to use MacOS so I didn’t know there wasn’t a “computer icon” but I love that detail. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that whole anecdote is fictitious.
Hating an operating system such that someone wouldn’t use it in exchange for a million dollars is quite the flex.
I’m an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver. MacOS just grinds on me in ways I can’t properly articulate.
Edit: oh wait, maybe I can!
And you’re obsessed with giant cocks. This is very interesting. A therapist could write a book on you.
“Cock,” singular. It wouldn’t be a very interesting book. I don’t have any hard to pronounce problems, I’m just a jerk.
I’m an IT person professionally, and I use Fedora as my daily driver.
Ah, Fedora, that brings back memories. We used to call it RootHat back in the day when it was still RedHat. It was what all the first-time Linux users used before they graduated to Debian or Slackware. They would use root as they day to day account, hence the name.
Havent used it in forever. Is it still as big a pile of shit as it was in the 90’s ?
I’ve been using it since Fedora Core 7 back in like 05 or something. It’s pretty solid. I use mate rather than gnome, but otherwise it’s an excellent, very FOSS, choice.
I’m so used to Windows getting dunked on here that I forget MacOS must be more hated, being even more locked down than Windows.
The original Macintosh had the OS on a floppy disk. So there wasn’t a “Computer” on the desktop. And if you dragged the Macintosh OS disk to the trash it would just eject it so you could put in another disk. (Unless you were lucky enough to have an external floppy drive.)
The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.
Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.
Yes! I remember this happening a lot, and I could never really truly understand the thought process behind it! But the thing is, this is still happening today, just in different context, and it’s still equally as baffling!
It just means that they called their browser “the internet” right? Or am I missing something here?
It was an actual icon:
(found the image here https://mastodon.social/@benjedwards/11031604817437112)
I don’t remember what it did though. I think it wasn’t the browser, and I have a vague memory it wasn’t for dial up either, but my memory’s shit so I personally wouldn’t trust me on that
Edit: had to look this up, it was IE. I think I didn’t remember it because I never really used IE since I started off with NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
I have a vague memory of the browser icon having the name “Internet” back in the day. Or maybe it was the dial-up icon. Might be that?
The original “Internet Explorer” icon was a globe and magnifying glass, with the text “The Internet,” underneath
There was actually a german ad about this quite some time ago: a grandma did this, then called her grandson “i think i just deleted the internet”.
How the ad continued? No clue.
What it was advertising? No clue.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
If you ever think “an actual human couldn’t possibly click that fast”, you are wrong. Debounce your critical actions.
It doesn’t matter if a human can’t, some idiot is going to open an autoclicker at 1000cps and break it
I promise you I have done exactly that, i had an auto clicker bound to my space bar and was to lazy to click and would just hold the space bar down when I knew that I was going to click a bunch of gui buttons.(which I though wouldnt be problem) Quickly learned some programs don’t like it at all. Lol
Love the extra work you went through in order to not have to click the mouse button. :p
Humans are wild.
I didn’t have to work on it for just to not click through ui menus, I just had my autoclicker enabled from some reason(likely game) and just randomly thought, “I’ll use the autoclick, lol” and had some interesting stuff happen. It was entertaining and nothing about being practical.
What would you do when you needed to type a space?
I would turn off the auto clicker, I just had it on randomly
well id expect the computer to crash if i threw it in the trash can
hahahaha i was thinking of this very gif, stop reading my mind
would be even better if the pc actually teleported to his trash bin
I can imagine thinking it’s be funny in the early stages where things wouldn’t really be too logical they way they are now. Might even assume it wouldn’t actually do anything and I could just pull it back out.
Game makers should hire me to test their maps, if there’s a spot where I can get 100% stuck no matter what, you bet your shiny metal ass I’ll find it.
Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a small-town hardware store chain (nuts and bolts, not computers) that was computerizing. A few weeks after we rolled it out, a customer came in with two gift certificates to purchase one item.
It seems pretty basic now, but using two gift certificates to purchase one item was simply not a requirement anyone had thought of. The system had no way to ring it up. The assistant manager of the store did the smart thing and rung it up as a gift certificate plus cash for the balance, so that the customer was good to go. They had to do some adjustments on the back end for that one sale and then update the software to allow for that situation.
I always remember that when I’m working on requirements for systems, wondering what obvious things we’re not thinking of…
I once deleted system32…That’s when I began calling the shots.
I hadn’t heard the Mac story before. I wonder if it’s legit, as I don’t think the Mac, or the Lisa before it, ever had the equivalent of a My Computer icon. Disks appear directly on the desktop; dragging a disk to the trash can ejects it if its removable media, and the only type of disk the original Mac had was a 400KB single-sided 3.5” floppy drive.
This story is a lie.
There’s no “computer icon”. Dragging the System disk to trash ejects it on a classic Mac. If you burrow down into System, you can try deleting system files… which are locked and can’t be deleted.
You can test this yourself on Infinite Mac
i mean, this story sounds like it’s from pre-release testing, or maybe a trade show demo showing a pre-release build. it not working this way in the release version just makes sense, and doesn’t mean this is a fake story.
No such demo happened. They unveiled the 128K with that System 1.0 on stage at a special event. The Lisa has a different UI, but also can’t do what’s described.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means that the demo wasn’t public.
Yes your uncle who works at Nintendo ^W Apple told you about it.
Not necessarily – the story might have described a beta version of the OS, in which these interactions worked differently.
I have to agree. The Macintosh 128k didn’t even have an internal HDD. Everything was run on 3.5" floppies. Heck they may have invented the 3.5" floppy, idk. As you said, dragging the system dick icon to the trash on a 128k was literally the easiest way to eject the disk.
My father still owns one, that may actually work. He also got 2 extra external floppy drives for the thing. He also has an Apple ]|[
Well if the story is true, wouldn’t they have just fixed the software, so it would have never seen the light of day?
If they had “fixed” it, there would be a “My Computer” icon. No such thing exists, go TRY the Infinite Mac I linked above.
Unless this story is from preproduction software and they got rid of the computer icon. Or maybe that detail was misremembered and it was actually a disc icon.
