• (cs)

    I finally get it now... this article was supposed to be published on April Fools. Ah dang it, Remy, you can't do anything right.

  • Hajamieli (unregistered)

    The REAL WTF is a soft-powered Macintosh LC. I call bullshit on this article.

    The start button on the keyboard did nothing, unless the computer supported soft-power. Soft-powered Macs at the time could be started both from the special keyboard button as well as the power switch on the computer and by means of the RTC alarm, like "every tuesday and monday at 06:45".

    However, the LC did not support such fancy things. The soft-power was included only on the more luxurious Macs, like the Macintosh II series and the higher-end Quadra machines. The LC and other low-end/low-cost machines like the compact Macs had a regular mechanical I/O switch on the computer, just like any appliance.

  • (cs) in reply to Hajamieli

    "and usually, he would always try and make sure..."

    Really? Usually, he would always? "Try and"? "Try and" is poor form. I'll leave out any comment about "usually he would always"... :-)

  • John (unregistered) in reply to Lindsay
    Lindsay:
    Mr. Rosso is the coolest guidance counselor/substitute teacher ever! He introduced me to The Dead and I never looked back.

    Comment of the day.

  • (cs) in reply to John
    John:
    Lindsay:
    Mr. Rosso is the coolest guidance counselor/substitute teacher ever! He introduced me to The Dead and I never looked back.

    Comment of the day.

    You mean "Yesterday"!!!

  • Kiz (unregistered) in reply to anon
    anon:
    So TRWTF was this shitty, pointless story making TDWTF?

    Quoted for truth... This is the sort of rubbish you read on FML and other sites populated by high-school teens. This sounds like an episode of a lame soap/drama... not a WTF.

  • O (unregistered)

    Freaks and Geeks?

  • quisquis (unregistered) in reply to hoodaticus
    hoodaticus:
    Actually, it's programmers that I expect should be able to spell and use proper grammar and syntax. Our code won't even compile if we screw it up in a programming language. There should be significant carry-over into other languages, such as English.

    +1.

    Don't remember which computer pioneer said something along the lines of: You should be able to express a problem and its solution in English. If you cannot, then you won't be able to write a corresponding program either.

    Development is more than getting around compiler error messages.

  • (cs) in reply to quisquis
    quisquis:
    hoodaticus:
    Actually, it's programmers that I expect should be able to spell and use proper grammar and syntax. Our code won't even compile if we screw it up in a programming language. There should be significant carry-over into other languages, such as English.

    +1.

    Don't remember which computer pioneer said something along the lines of: You should be able to express a problem and its solution in English. If you cannot, then you won't be able to write a corresponding program either.

    Development is more than getting around compiler error messages.

    So English fluency is a requirement for progamming?

  • stylez (unregistered)

    Freshman year of high school I wrote a prank DOS-like program and copied it to every PC, also adding it to autoexec.bat.

    It was quite fun to watch the short-tempered programming teacher go apeshit because "dir C:" resulted in a screenful of ASCII hearts, spades, smilies, lines, etc in place of alphanumerics; attempting to execute "EDIT" resulted in a printer-dump of a random .EXE or .COM file. Moving to the next PC and having the same problems, he grew ever more pissed off to the point of exclaiming "Fuck this shit!" in ear-shot of 3 classes (2 Mac labs surrounded the PC lab on either side, typically with the doors open). He spent that night formatting and re-installing DOS on every PC.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to keith
    keith:
    ProfessorTom:
    So really, the WTF is why "Bill" hates Macintoshes, when they are designed to be VERY user friendly yet very powerful as they have a *NIX underpinning.

    Hey professor, 1990 called and the buyers of Macintosh LC's would like to know what a *NIX underpinning is, and what it has to do with Mac OS 7.

    It was running A/UX on the keyboard controller, you insensitive clod!

  • Liviu (unregistered)

    Sweet story. As a programmer, I know how the guy must have felt, but usually a bit of luck saves the day. Anyway, it was just a little joke, not the end of the world; it seems to me that in this story the guy worries too much for his future.

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to campkev
    campkev:
    Did you tell them about 9/11? Haiti? Katrina?

    No, we didn't want to ruin the surprise!

  • Vogon (unregistered)

    Awright, I got my own storie too...

    Our computer class (Back in 1989) had a lab stocked with... less than state-of-the-art Apple IIe computers. (Ah, the heady days of ProDOS!)

    I had found a way to write a program in Apple Basic that would emulate ProDOS and apple basic itself. I had worked most of the typical ProDOS commands in to the parser, and even set it up so that a quick 10 line or so program could be typed in and executed.

    Unless the victim inserted a floppy disk and attempted to load a program. My program would then identify the file name, delete that program from the disk, and erase itself from memory.

    I loaded the program in class exactly once. As the class ended, and I was walking out the door, I noticed our teacher walk to that computer, floppy disk in hand, and sit down. I never heard a word about it afterward.

  • Otmane (unregistered)

    Where is the cornify_add() function? And it's supposed to do?

  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    i think it's worth mentioning that very early Apple computers had the "reset" button (which instantly reboots the computer) right above the enter key! VERY bad design.

  • Axel (unregistered)

    I was suspended no fewer than 200 times, and they still let me into community theater.

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