h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Who remembers the seminal "Keyboard not present or not functioning - press F1 to continue"?

Sure enough remember that one , how about "ROM Basic not present" , a hold over from the original PCs ( with a port for a cassette drive ) which still appears on some new computers ( translate as "I can't find anything bootable" ).

Yup, know it well! I've even seen "AT Class" (286) machines which ask you to insert the "BASIC" cassette and press "PLAY"!

(I have 2 of the original "Cassette port enabled" PCs in my collection...)

Think I could find a few MBs of that sort if I dug under enough of the scrap pile at home. Thinking back to pre-IBM PCs , the error message list was pretty short , but then again you could go months between major errors . As I recall there were a couple of dozen error messages built into the old Commodore PET , but in use I've never seen most of them come up other then the floppy disk related ones. Before that the IMSAII 8080 didn't have a BIOS , and an error at boot up usually meant you'd toggled part of the bootstrap in wrong. ( just flip through the sequence and watch the flashing lights to find what you'd gotten wrong , or where to start re-entering )

Is it just me or is technology more tetchy these days? When I was in further education at a variety of institutions around the UK I had an old 5 1/4 inch floppy disk that I carried in my jacket pocket. My jacket went everywhere with me, to bar's, to pubs, to parties, to bars even to the occasional lecture.

My pocket was filled with fluff, tobacco, other "herbs", rizlas, lighters, lighter fluid and other crap. Not once did that disk have any errors on it, and this was after I had punched a second hole and cut a second write protect notch in it to allow it to be used either way up in the single sided disk drive I had on my BBC.

These days I throw away about 5% of the CDRs I use at work cause something goes wrong with them.

Chris

When I was first using 5.25" floppies on an Apple II, I dropped one in a muddy puddle and stepped on it - it had all my screen fonts on it, so I cut the sleeve open, washed the disk inside and put it in a clean sleeve. All but one of the fonts survived, even though grit had punched a couple of holes in the surface!

Yep , I have done salvage on the old floppies to , often very successfully. Alot of the new hardware has very tight tolerances , but I find the biggest source of problems seems to be the Windows operating system. Did you know Windows 98 can load up multiple drivers for a single device and it doesn't show any problems unless you boot it up in safe mode to check ? I found 5 drivers listed for my CDR which seems to be why it worked about once out of 5 tries.

Scary stuff, I will check my PC as I have updated the graphics drivers several times.

Ta

Chris