Posts by ralphh 28 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jun 2014
~2000 Luxembourg. I found a IBM Model M[?] keyboard in the spares and decided to use it.
It had a large, vertical enter key and Swiss-French or other keycaps. I used it with a US code page and touch-typed.
One day one of the other developers had to use my workstation, I found him copy/pasting a character, a semi-colon or quote maybe, as that was the only way he could generate the character.
Once upon three and a half decades ago I was installing and repairing personal computers.
Servicing IBM Model F[?] keyboards we'd usually just remove the keycaps, give them a soapy bath and reattach them the next day.
Occasionally a keyboard would be in such a state we'd disassemble it past unscrewing the plastics and by straightening the metal tabs within further disassemble it. We'd then hose it down with a Freon product and reassemble it.
They'd reassemble, look and work a treat but we probably didn't do the ozone layer any favours.
Sydney, November 1990. As a developer on a OS/2 based dealing room system I was onsite for the first few weeks as the software went live.
Cue a raised hand I went to the assistant of a dealer, the screen was all black. On second look the highlight of the edge of the current control was white.
It turns out the user has decided to see what would happen if he set every system color, scrollbar, menu, title bar, foreground, background and everything possible to black.
Had to use the adjacent machine as a guide to key press my way back to default.
This reminded me of being in on-site in 1990 the first week a new dealing room with our software went live. One user asked for help, both screens of his OS/2 system were nearly entirely black. Turned out he'd gone to the control panel and changed every color to black. Scroll bars, foreground, background, title bar, the lot.
Used another system as a reference to keystroke my way back to default colors.
My first time? Email access via cc:Mail on starting work in Melbourne in June 1988, does that count?
After day spent in the lab hearing the dialing to the local node multiple times a day I can still whistle the DTMF modem dials I'd always hear.
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