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Why does this feel so liminal?

I had a buddy who claimed his uncle worked at Microsoft. His uncle had given him the new Windows version called "Chicago" and I was all like "That name ain't Windows 4.0, gettouttahere!"

Turns out he did have an uncle who worked at Microsoft who fed him beta versions of W95 to get an idiot's point of view. I doubt that shit would fly today, preview versions would be leaked like military secrets on the Warthunder forums!

So when another buddy claimed he had an uncle who worked at Nintendo...

I was there Gandalf, three thousand year ago when we invented write cache and the strength of men failed. After that we needed to ask the computer for permission to turn it off, instead of just killing it like we are supposed to.

Although I was old enough to have had spinning rust hard drives that didn't park their heads automatically when losing power. You would have to issue a park command manually to get the drive to park the heads. That way when the computer was sitting there powered off, the heads would be secure and not at risk of damaging themselves or the platter when the power resumed and the disk spun up again. The risk was minimal, but with prices the way they were back then, we always took care to park the heads. And when auto parking was a thing, it was such muscle memory, it took a long time to unlearn.

Trivia moment: in italian the message was "È ora possibile spegnere il computer" and thanks to the fact "ora" means both hour and now, many people read it as "È ora di spegnere il computer" (It's time to shutdown your computer)

!weirdcore@sopuli.xyz material 👌