• (cs) in reply to MichaelWojcik
    MichaelWojcik:
    Someone You Know:
    I would think that there would be a small area in each corner of a floppy disk that one could safely put a staple through ...

    It's a pretty large area on a 5 1/4 inch disk, as you'll see if you inscribe a circle in a square 5 1/4 inches on a side. 1 1/2 square inches of free space, more or less, in each corner. (Note the sleeve is slightly larger than the disk itself; if they were the same size, there'd be about 1.48 square inches.)

    I've seen 5 1/4 disks survive all sorts of abuse. Computer magazines sometimes shipped disks with sample software bound in. You'd tear them free from the binding, run the edges over a table edge to crease them straight, and pop it in the drive. I don't recall ever seeing one failing.

    On the other hand, the only specific software I remember from a disk of this sort was a "preview" of the first version of Micrsoft Word for DOS, which certainly constitutes a failure in itself.

    I knew a guy who kept a DOS boot disk stuck to the side of a filing cabinet with a magnet. People would always think he was an idiot since they knew the magnet would wipe out the disk. What they didn't know is that as long as the magnet was centered over the hole of the disk, it didn't wipe out the outer tracks that were needed to boot.

  • (cs)

    Actual campus tech call (old but good)...

    I was installing the software with the 4 floppy disks, but I could only fit three of them in the drive!

  • Steve (unregistered)

    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

  • Rich (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that these crusty old relics that have been hanging round the internet since /etc/hosts was all there was for name lookups have been dredged up and posted here.

    I leave the site for a couple of months and come back to a crappy webcomic and stuff I was deleting from my inbox 15 years ago.

    No thanks

    Rich

  • (cs) in reply to Dick Asscock, III
    Penis Buttpenis:
    I just want to know when this madness will end? Perhaps when the Boomers finally retire?

    Just today, in 2008, I dealt with a lame issue where the user entered N/A in a free form text field instead of just leaving it blank as the system expected. Mind you, this is a custom field added to a fancy-pants $$$, modern ERP system. I think the problem is with so many tech managers or PMs coming from a COBOL background where free form is all they understand.

    Don't you validate user input?

    Our application throws NullPointerExceptions all the time because users DON'T fill text fields. Whenever I see an opportunity to do some null checking while I'm working on something I go ahead and throw it in there.

    What ticks me off is when we get a request to convert a free-typing field into a drop-down with specific values to choose from. I don't think people understand the concept of data migration ("Should I map 'foobarblahblah texty text text' to '1.0 GHz' or '3.14 GHz'?"). Regular expressions are helpful ('one-point-oh gigaherts,' 'one-dot-oh giggahurtz,' etc...), but when the field contains something completely different for every row in a 20000 row table it gets rather annoying :(.

  • Justice (unregistered)

    Here's one for you: I'd been at my last job about three months. One fun thing they hadn't mentioned before I signed on was that every developer had to do at least one support ticket per month, due to the massive backlog of tickets (several thousand). They already had about four or five full-time support developers.

    Most of the tickets were generated from one big in-house application that all the sales and operations people used. Must have been a total pile of garbage, right? Well...yes, but it worked ok, and that wasn't the real cause of all the tickets.

    So I get my first support ticket: there's a problem with some transaction data not showing up in search results. I couldn't find anything in the software, so I took a look at our production database, and sure enough the data doesn't exist. These were transaction records from a year and a half before I even started there. Furthermore, I didn't have direct contact with anyone who was even in charge of this sort of thing (the company's IT org structure was a WTF in itself), and the only people I could contact were the "never return phone calls or emails" brand of programmer.

    I called up the lady who filed the report and told her "Yeah, the reason they're not being displayed is because they either weren't recorded or have been deleted. It's not a software problem; the data you want isn't in the database."

    I will never forget her response: "Well, where is it?! That's what I need to know!"

    Fortunately, I don't work there anymore.

  • (cs) in reply to Rich
    Rich:
    The real WTF is that these crusty old relics that have been hanging round the internet since /etc/hosts was all there was for name lookups have been dredged up and posted here.

    I leave the site for a couple of months and come back to a crappy webcomic and stuff I was deleting from my inbox 15 years ago.

    Not only that, but on home computers all over the world, right this minute, people with no jobs, no life and nothing to do but send emails are issuing the latest batch of "send this to fifteen friends in the next five minutes or else".

    And, the price of gas is going up.

    People on the freeway drive discourteously, like, all the time, man!

    The president is a brainless dumbass, but the ones who voted for him are even worse.

    You didn't get your coffee in your favorite cup this morning.

    Damn... life sucks.

    Rich:
    No thanks

    Rich

    Bye.

  • Justice (unregistered)

    Oh, and incidentally, Help Desk Girl FTW!

  • (cs) in reply to Jon B
    Jon B:
    My laptop is wireless. It worked for about 4 hours and then just stopped. Won't even turned on. I bought a new one and it did the same thing.

    Now THAT is funny.

  • some nethacker (unregistered) in reply to Justice
    Justice:
    Oh, and incidentally, Help Desk Girl FTW!

    She'll never replace Irish Girl in my heart!

  • Ken B (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.
    I don't think the WTFness comes from the staple per se. Rather, it was the staple combined with:
    A few days later, a Jiffy bag (ED: translation “padded envelope”) duly arrived at the shop with a large, red “FRAGILE” stamp on the front. Enclosed were two pieces of thick cardboard to hold the offending 5 1/4" disk
    Obviously, it wasn't "a useless piece of mylar" to her.
  • (cs) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?
    Welcome to the Eighties, in which all we had for output were VT-100 clones and the only ways to distinguish anything on the screen visually were BOLD, UNDERLINE, REVERSE_VIDEO, and BLINK. "Half intensity" was a bonus feature added later on; usually it was normal with all the other fields set to BOLD.

    As for "why" . . . the user has to be able to see a difference between labels and editable-fields, that's why.

  • Dick Asscock, III (unregistered) in reply to PerdidoPunk

    Sure, the original developer validated the input (SAP ABAP to check if initial). I understand your point--there's obviously a need for both types of field entry, but too often in my world, it's free form for no damn reason.

    I found my problem very similar to the Simpson's episode where Homer was filling out Lisa's Little Miss Springfield application and chose to write "OK" in the box that states "Do not write in this box".

    Richard Azzcock, III (or Penis Buttpenis, III)

  • (cs) in reply to Dick Asscock, III
    Dick Asscock:
    ...and chose to write "OK" in the box that states "Do not write in this box".
    And don't forget to put "Yes, please" in the "Sex" field.
  • Carl (unregistered) in reply to Todd

    It reached me thanks, however, if i have it i fear others wont be able to read it. How can i send it back to you?

  • An oppressed mass (unregistered)

    My cable modem has a small unlabelled black button moulded into the top of the black case. If you touch this button it goes into standby and turns all the leds off.

    I finally called tech support and after explaining that I was a network expert and knew what I was doing, so they wouldn't just tell me to reinstall windows - they said "is there a little black button on the top..."

  • psb (unregistered)

    Mini Office - that was some crap software. I remember using it on my CPC 464 back in the day. I guess it met the expectations its title gave.

  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to Ken B
    Ken B:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.
    I don't think the WTFness comes from the staple per se. Rather, it was the staple combined with:
    A few days later, a Jiffy bag (ED: translation “padded envelope”) duly arrived at the shop with a large, red “FRAGILE” stamp on the front. Enclosed were two pieces of thick cardboard to hold the offending 5 1/4" disk
    Obviously, it wasn't "a useless piece of mylar" to her.

    It's not so much a WTF as it is a WTA (well-that's-amusing).

    Dan.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

  • Michael (unregistered)

    ah, the good old days and innocent/naive clients!

    Twenty years ago I did an apprentice ship in Germany as a raiod and tv engineer/mechanic. In these days there were still some black and white TVs out there. So whenever some customer came into the shop and said:"My TV is broken! Can you pop by and fix it?" we had to ask whether it's colour or B/W. Following situation:

    Customer:"My TV is broken! Can you pop by and fix it?" Salesguy:"Is it colour or B/W?" Customer (thinks for a second):"It's oak."

    still funny after 20 years. at least for me.

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to An oppressed mass
    An oppressed mass:
    My cable modem has a small unlabelled black button moulded into the top of the black case. If you touch this button it goes into standby and turns all the leds off.

    I finally called tech support and after explaining that I was a network expert and knew what I was doing, so they wouldn't just tell me to reinstall windows - they said "is there a little black button on the top..."

    I'm staring at my Motorola SB5120 cable modem given to me by Comcast.

    Thanks to that undocumented "feature" my home network was down for no apparent reason for a week. Then when I was checking all my gear for the umpteenth time I accidentally pressed that button. Never even knew it existed. Suddenly, the cable modem came alive.

  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    Actually, color isn't a good method. A sizable portion of the population is color blind. Relying on color alone just isn't going to work. Intensity is probably your only option (or maybe underlines) given the technology of the day.

  • Drone (unregistered)

    This reminds my of my own experience with my grandmother:

    Me: Your printer doesn't work because it needs electricity. You need to plug it in first. Gma: Oh ok. Hold on, I'm unplugging my refrigerator now.

    Yes, you read that correctly. And she really did mean it.

  • Mr. Boo-urns (unregistered) in reply to tuna

    Your taxonomic pedantry is to be applauded.

    However, this site is fucked halfway to Sunday.

  • (cs) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    Steve:
    I don't see the first item, Duly Noted from Ed, as a WTF. The disk was obviously gronked, she sent it in to be replaced. At that point, it was a useless piece of mylar covered with some very fine iron particles, as far as she cared.

    The second, Not Too Bright from Tony, is more of a user interface issue than a WTF. Why use "half intensity" for "protected fields" in the first place?

    Color is a very clear way to differentiate fields from one another. For example, the currently selected field can be highlighted. Another example: required fields can be in red.

    Now that could be tricky on a green screen monitor, which was the style of the time.

  • Slyer (unregistered)

    I had a customer insist rather than buying two sticks of 128mb ram he was going to snap a 256mb stick in half and share it between two computers, his accomplice slapped him around. "You don't snap it you idiot! You cut it!"

    Oh, and the lady that phoned up saying that her ipod wasn't working, turns out she was trying to play music on her flash drive.

  • ThePhwner (unregistered) in reply to Mr. Boo-urns

    To you, and everyone else who:

    --doesn't think the WTFs are WTFs

    --doesn't fully RTFA before making uninformed comments

    --thinks the site isn't what it used to be

    --or doesn't like the site content in general....

    Just do the rest of us a favor and stop visiting. Most of the stories posted here are pretty amusing and bring a bright spot into what can be a troubling/frustrating/exhausting day. There's also a link right at the top of the page to provide your feedback on site content, you might consider taking advantage.

    I guarantee that for every "this isn't a true WTF" post, there are 50 people wishing those posts didn't exist.

  • ChiefCrazyTalk (unregistered) in reply to Drone
    Drone:
    This reminds my of my own experience with my grandmother:

    Me: Your printer doesn't work because it needs electricity. You need to plug it in first. Gma: Oh ok. Hold on, I'm unplugging my refrigerator now.

    Yes, you read that correctly. And she really did mean it.

    So...the WTF is that your grandmother only had a limited number of electrical outlets in the house? I don't get it.

  • (cs) in reply to ChiefCrazyTalk
    ChiefCrazyTalk:
    Drone:
    This reminds my of my own experience with my grandmother:

    Me: Your printer doesn't work because it needs electricity. You need to plug it in first. Gma: Oh ok. Hold on, I'm unplugging my refrigerator now.

    Yes, you read that correctly. And she really did mean it.

    So...the WTF is that your grandmother only had a limited number of electrical outlets in the house? I don't get it.

    A real WTF would've been if she'd said, "Hold on, I'm unplugging my computer now."

  • (cs) in reply to KludgeQueen

    In our university which is usually not a WTFU we had a guy who did not trust other people's config files. To use a special system on our network you need to have an ssh key in your home directory. But he did not trust other people's config. He knew so much that he could get ls to show him all files including files and dirs like ~/.ssh. He deleted everything he did not know. First time was ok, we told him not to do it again. He did and not only one time but three more times. We call him Dotfiles now and it was the first time our admin got really aggresive.

  • Tech Support Monkey (unregistered)

    I currently do tech support for a company that makes software for Mac OS. A few months back I had a customer frantically contact us because she could not figure out to send us an email.

    The WTF is that she emailed the question to us.

  • IBM (unregistered) in reply to Dale
    Dale:
    Finally, I got him to press the On button on the CPU after he pressed the On button on the monitor. His next words were, "Well, I'll be . . ."

    I know XTs were a bit different from the modern PC, but...a power switch on the CPU?

  • h.e.l.p.e.r. (unregistered) in reply to FredSaw

    I do some help desk stuff at work in addition to my IT role, and it has never bothered me when a question was stupid, because by the time I walk to someone's desk I've already done my best to put myself in their shoes.

    What really pisses me off is when the questions are lined with selfishness.

    "The system is down." Shit, the whole thing? What's going on? Why didn't anyone else tell me? What's everyone doing? "No, I just can't get on."

    Usually they got locked out of a file or forgot their password. Some might say "I forgot my password". But there's always one or two that will instead report "nothing's working", with the implication that I've been negligent and things are in disrepair.

    "Nothing's working" is also the most incredibly, mind-numbingly vague thing you could say to someone who is there try and troubleshoot something specific.

    Hey, I don't need you to tell me exactly what the problem is...it's all magic anyway. And anyway if something isn't working, I already know about it because I in fact broke it. On purpose. Just to piss YOU off. And we're not colleagues, working towards the same goals. Nah, I'm just your bitch. When you plug your LAN cable into a phone line, "the system is down", hence, I screwed up.

    I like helping people because it's cool when you can show them a better way of doing something, and they're once again impressed by the strange machine they sit in front of. But I can't run away fast enough from the selfish ones.

    When there's traffic on my street, do I call the police and tell them the nation's road infrastructure has failed? No, because somehow I understand there's other people in the world. I understand this even though I am not a civil engineer. I don't scream at flight attendants, despite having never been a pilot. And so on. It has nothing to do with computers.

  • JB (unregistered)

    Wow, suddenly I am reminded of my high school teacher who struggled to use a mouse. The instructional PC was connected to the projector so we could see the full glory of her primitive, clumsy, two-handed attempts to reposition it. "Ok, I think I need to push it to the right now..." And this wasn't a social studies or religon or even art class. It was programming!

    Sadly, having to teach my entire row of students was a rewarding experience compared to my senior year databases course. Between tenure and the boatloads of grant money this professor brought in, he knew that "teaching" was just a formality and boy did he show what not-even-trying looks like.

    Most of our lecture time was gobbled up when he'd laugh at his own stupid jokes and non-sequiters and not realize that most of the class were shamelessly but transparently humoring him. That laughing feedback loop was more painfull than the worste user ignorance.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    A co-worker of mine was supposed to make some updates to a program and send the new version to another office. This was pre-internet days so it was expected she'd mail it. She didn't get the job done on schedule, so she got a blank floppy, put a label on it with the program name, stuck it in a manilla envelope, and stapled the envelope closed. Carefully and deliberately putting the staple through the floppy. When the other office received it and saw the staple through the floppy, of course they called to say there was problem. "Those idiots in the mail room!" my friend exclaimed. "All right, I'll send you another disk." The ploy bought here three days to get the job done.

  • Xander (unregistered)

    I currently work at a University Help Desk, and have accumulated tons of these stories. From the guy who thought that he called the number for rehab to the woman who asked how much it would cost to send email overseas, I've dealt with some pretty interesting calls. The biggest WTF that I've heard of came from one of my colleagues:

    Customer: My wireless internet isn't working. I can't get to any web pages. Support: (Obvious question out of the way first) Is your wireless router connected properly? Are there any loose connections? C: Wireless router? No, I've been charging the internet all day, and I can't even get a few minutes out of it. S: Charging the internet? C: Yeah, I plug my computer into the wall where the internet lives to charge it, but when I unplug it, I don't have any internet.

    My colleague was tempted to tell the customer that she had to go to Best Buy to get a new internet battery.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I've had to help out the help desk folks now and then. I usually have no problem being patient with people who don't know much about computers. (If everybody was a computer expert, they wouldn't pay me the big bucks.)

    But one day I got a call from a customer who complained that a certain report "wouldn't print". I started out with the obvious "is the printer turned on" and "is it plugged in". I tried to walk her through the menu picks to print the report again. She said that the report still didn't print. I moved on to more complicated things like problems with the spooler. After almost an hour on the phone trying to diagnose printer problems, she made a comment about something on the report. "Wait," I said puzzled, "You just said the report wouldn't print." "That's right," she said, "The report won't print. The total line is all zeros." Yes, it rapidly developed that by "the report doesn't print" she meant "the totals are incorrect". I would have thought that even if you know absolutely nothing about computers, surely it is obvious that there is a big difference between "the report doesn't print" and "the report has incorrect totals". Apparently not.

  • sfasfiojjioji (unregistered) in reply to Joe
    Joe:
    An oppressed mass:
    My cable modem has a small unlabelled black button moulded into the top of the black case. If you touch this button it goes into standby and turns all the leds off.

    I finally called tech support and after explaining that I was a network expert and knew what I was doing, so they wouldn't just tell me to reinstall windows - they said "is there a little black button on the top..."

    I'm staring at my Motorola SB5120 cable modem given to me by Comcast.

    Thanks to that undocumented "feature" my home network was down for no apparent reason for a week. Then when I was checking all my gear for the umpteenth time I accidentally pressed that button. Never even knew it existed. Suddenly, the cable modem came alive.

    They've removed these buttons from the latest version. Why in heaven's name it was even there to begin with was a giant WTF.

  • M.I.K.e (unregistered)

    While I never really worked at tech support I do have my share of stories that I've been told.

    One customer called that he didn't see anything on his display. Tech support went through all the typical options (power, turned on, connected, etc.). In the end it turned out that the display was working fine, only the customer didn't see what he wanted to see.

    During a lunch break one of the administrators explained that someone from the company tried to e-mail the newest Nestscape to his home address, because his internet access at home was too slow to download it from there. Obviously it was still the age of the modem.

    A customer complained that our CD-ROMs were getting eaten by his drive. An administrator at the customer's figured it out. The user was not used to slot-in drives and instead of putting the CDs into the slot he somehow managed to push them through the gaps above or below the drive into the computer case.

  • s. (unregistered)

    For the credit on the second story...

    Not very long ago I got myself a dumb terminal to read stuff and browse text-only from my bed before sleep. I -knew- it has a brightness control dial but it took me good 15 minutes to locate it. I mean, there are some 3 dials on the back, the power switch on the front, all the sockets in the base and that seems to be it. I turned it over, checked, double checked, until I finally found a part of the lower right round corner of the monitor to be movable, the dial embedded so neatly that it looked completely like a part of the case, you change brightness by rubbing the corner. No indication it's a movable part anywhere, just two more gaps than on the other side.

  • (cs) in reply to Xander
    Xander:
    C: Yeah, I plug my computer into the wall where the internet lives to charge it, but when I unplug it, I don't have any internet.

    Shhhh! You hear that? The Internet! Oh my God, it's in the walls! Ruuuuun!

    Brilliant

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    I'd consider some of the support that I have to do in my daily job to be just as bad, or even worse than the ones in the article above!

    Quite often I'm reminding them (or more frequently, travelling across the site myself) to plug the PC into the power. The brightness on the monitor thing is also a very common occurence, assuming of course they remember to turn on their monitors.

    Lets not forget people who've jammed printer toners the wrong way into printers, written on the data side of a burned CD and my favourite: Someone trying to load a 'shell' by stuffing an actual sea shell into a floppy disk drive. Needless to say the drive did not survive.

    All in a days work for an IT Technician in a UK School.

  • (cs) in reply to IBM
    IBM:
    Dale:
    Finally, I got him to press the On button on the CPU after he pressed the On button on the monitor. His next words were, "Well, I'll be . . ."
    I know XTs were a bit different from the modern PC, but...a power switch on the CPU?
    Some people refer to the tower as CPU. Still better than calling it modem or hard drive.
  • paratus (unregistered) in reply to ender
    ender:
    IBM:
    Dale:
    Finally, I got him to press the On button on the CPU after he pressed the On button on the monitor. His next words were, "Well, I'll be . . ."
    I know XTs were a bit different from the modern PC, but...a power switch on the CPU?
    Some people refer to the tower as CPU. Still better than calling it modem or hard drive.
    Yes, and considering the meaning of CPU, it isnt too wrong at all. It is the proccessing unit after all. ;)
  • (cs)

    Alex finally used my story - cool! I'm Ed by the way (the submitter of the the Duly Noted tale - and yes it happened in exactly the way described).

    The inner disk was well and truly punctured by the staples used to attach the fault description, but that's not really what made me laugh so much at the time - it's more that she went to some considerable effort to ensure that the disk arrived in mint condition without thinking what the consequences of driving a metal clip through the very thing she was trying to protect.

    Incidentally, at the same store we had a bloke ranting and raving at us the first day we re-opened after the Christmas (must have been 1990 or 1991). Anyway, said bloke was virtually turning purple shouting at the owner, accusing us of jointly ruining his boys' Christmas day. Under his arm was a Commodore Amiga 500, which filled me with dread because (as good as the machine was) there was a fairly high rate of DOA units.

    After about 30 minutes of ranting, the store owner managed to calm the bloke down and I got handed the Amiga box so I could get the computer out and test it. While I was doing this, the owner got the bloke to describe exactly why we'd ruined his boys' Christmas day.

    Turns out that the bloke had decided to hook up the Amiga for his boy on Christmas Eve so that it would be ready and waiting for his offspring the next day. He'd got the machine powered on and hooked up to the family TV, and according to the instructions he now needed to insert the Workbench floppy disk.

    Completely ignoring the helpful on-screen representation of a 3.5" floppy disk, this idiot had found the Workbench disk, and tried to "get it out of the carrying case. Don't make it easy for you do they? I had to use a knife. What's the trick?". Needless to say, inside the drive there was a naked 3.5" disk jammed in the works....

    Absolutely 100% true.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The real WTF in the 1st story is that Atari STs and Amigas used 3 1/2" disks, and Amstrad PCWs used funny 3" disks - so no wonder there was a problem with the 5 1/4" disk...

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The real WTF in the 1st story is that Atari STs and Amigas used 3 1/2" disks, and Amstrad PCWs used funny 3" disks - so no wonder there was a problem with the 5 1/4" disk...

    The Amstrad PC 1640 (like the PC 1512 before it) was an IBM-XT clone that used 5 1/4" disks. You're confusing that range with the PCW 8256 and the PCW 8512 which used the 3" disk format. This was replaced IIRC in the Amstrad PCW 9512 with a standard 3 1/2" drive.

    The Amstrad PC range started using 3 1/2" disks with the PC 2086.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to IceFreak2000

    I don't think I'm the one that's confused...

    I know that the PC1512/1640 had 5 1/4" disks - I used to use one...

    But the story said PCW - which had 3" disks (though they did use 3 1/2" disks on the later models).

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    I don't think I'm the one that's confused...

    I know that the PC1512/1640 had 5 1/4" disks - I used to use one...

    But the story said PCW - which had 3" disks (though they did use 3 1/2" disks on the later models).

    Except that the line from the story that's relevant is:

    ...called up, complaining about some issues with the application on her Amstrad PC 1640.
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to IceFreak2000

    Sorry - my mistake ! Completely missed the reference to the PC1640... So the real WTF was that my first post was a WTF...

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