We got some funny stories and in the end it was a bit more difficult to decide the winners than we imagined. Even more stories would have been welcome. The odds to win weren’t exactly bad!
Ticket number 1 goes to Finnish MEP Jyrki J J Kasvi. Crashing the Berkeley university server sounds like fun! It’s also a good story about how the world has changed in a very short time.
Ticker number 2 goes to Kalmisto. I can relate to this story: when I was about 8 or 9 I decided to type in a long program listing from Your Sinclair magazine. It was quite literally pages of HEX data statements and I believe it took me two days of sweat and tears, and it still wasn’t working and I wasn’t getting the cool game that it was supposed to be. I double checked every single hex, and still it wouldn’t work. Next month’s Your Sinclair revealed that the listing had been an April Fools joke…
Here are the two stories again:
(Jyrki)
It happened about 14 years ago when our son was born. I had taken my Canon Ion, one of the first digital cameras on the market to the hospital and took pictures of the wrinkly one. Then I transferred those images from Ion’s analog disks(!!!) to my computer and emailed them to my friends studying in UC Berkeley without compressing or downsizing them.
While those pictures were tiny by today’s standards they were big enough to crash the UC Berkeley mail server. Next morning my friends got a very frustrated call from the university computing department asking them to download those ### pictures and clear the disk space for proper use. Later, this incident was used in UC Berkeley as an example, how not to use email.
Of course, nowadays we know better than to send digital pictures as email attachments.
(Kalma)
I had a great digital adventure when I first got my Atari 800XL as a kid and received this huge Basic programming manual. There was this text about registries and stuff which was an example of how to get a colourful banana being drawn into the screen. The example had this capital letter text (translated from FINNISH to ENGLISH here): DRAW A BANANA OUT OF DATA MEANING “YELLOW”. and since every code examples in the book were in capital letters I thought this ‘code’ would actually give me a picture of a banana. It didn’t, no matter what I tried so I got frustrated and stopped and started playing Donkey Kong and Ms.Pacman. It was my first programming frustration ever, and it’s a dear and a most valued memory these days. I ALMOST CRIED BACK THEN!!1 ;___; DD’:
Congratulations to the winners! You can fetch your tickets from the Scred office: Cable Factory, door E, 5th floor.
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