Best Foreign Object To Date

[chaobell]

Other Tech cracks the case on an ancient, ancient box. We're talking Big Red Switch on the side, here. This thing's manuals were probably handwritten. Possibly on scrolls, papyrus, or clay tablets. That old.

I am on the other end of the benches working on another computer. I notice Other Tech blinking in disbelief at the relic.

"...Come look at this," he says to me, and so I do.

There is an ancient three-button mouse inside the case.

Mouse. INSIDE THE CASE.

Dear Customer,

THAT DON'T GO THERE.

xoxo
Me

Comments

[diji.livejournal.com]

Not mouse, "foot pedal". :)

[agentz.livejournal.com]

Description of fault: Loose nut behind keyboard.

speaking of relics

[akage.livejournal.com]

That reminded me of the time we were upgrading the computer lab for the Physics department on campus. The Physics department, mind you. Guys who should be running particle simulations and other sorts of math-intensive goodies.

They had a box down there that I couldn't immediately recognize, so we broke out the tools and cracked the case. Now, I went to school for an archaeology degree anyway, not comp sci, and this is one of the few instances where the two disciplines converged. ;-)

Inside was a motherboard large enough to be an end table. I'm still not entirely sure what it was, but it was definitely pre-8086 (looked to be mid to late 70's design). It was also covered in a layer of dust half an inch thick. Some nimrod on our upgrade/excavation team popped out a can of compressed air, and before we could stop him...POOF. Instant allergy attack for everyone within 10 meters.

This relic was accompanied by a monochrome monitor that was about 10" of screen in a 30" case, and sitting on top of a stack of old textbooks entitled "Learning FORTRAN II". The sample bits of code in the book were accompanied by diagrams showing how to fill out the appropriate punch cards.

The one other bit we salvaged out of there was a 1K floppy disk. It's about 10" wide. One of the more amusing pranks to play on newbies on the support desk was to walk in with this clown-shoe size floppy, walk up to the newbie and in all seriousness say "I have a report I need to get off this disk, but I can't seem to find any computers that will read it. Can you help me?"

The look of panic alone was worth the trouble. ;-)

Re: speaking of relics

[chaobell]

I printed this out and showed it to my boss. He howled.

And then related the story of the computer class he and a friend had ended up having to drop. Their project: a foot-deep stack of punch cards that would result in ASCII art of a gun being printed out.

The problem: they forgot to put the "print" command on every single card.