Some funny anecdotes in here and well written ones, too. Gave me a good laugh @crash to desktop and memory dump caused by a stack collision error. haha
I've some anecdotes as well. Although not that well written and probably not that funny, too.
1. to get into the BIOS of my 80286 with 8Mhz and 1 MB RAM, I had to run it without autoexec.bat and config.sys. After the entire booting cycle was complete, I had to press Control+Alt+Enter. It was nowhere documented (didn't have documents back then) and I found out by accident somehow (I was 12 y/o back then). Again, it was not in the beginning @post but really at the end of the entire boot cycle. And it didn't work when DOS was loaded. The entire thing started as one of my friends set up a BIOS password on his 386DX40 to lock it. I sat there with my old 80286 and tried to find out how to get into BIOS. Took me a really long time and I never forget how odd the way was to get there. I mean usually you get into BIOS @POST.
2. The father of my best friend brought a PC from work. It was meant for my best friend. Since it brought up some errors, I should examine it. The 4 of us sat there at the living room table. Best friend's dad, best friend and his older brother. These guys were mega excited because they've never seen an opened PC before. I was curious about what to find. And then I literally totally blew it.
So, I opened it up and saw the most dusty PC one can imagine. Well, what did 13 y/o me do? I inhaled as much as I could and then I blew the PC like some NES cartridge...
We sat there in one of the most ugly and big dust clouds imaginable. All coughing and laughing at the same time. Needless to say that I never did that again
The PC was absolutely obsolete, too. It was an XT (8086) with some super old SIMMS in it. So, absolutely non-salvagable.
3. LAN-Party-time ca 1996/97
I invited my best friends over and the 4 or 5 of us sat in my room at my home. It was 16m² or something. We did this a couple of times, then word got around. I had my own bell back then and it rang non-stop. More people came, and more. At the end, we were over 20 people in this room (3/4 of my highschool class - even some girls). Lots of shoes in the floor and my dad made some pretty rad photos. I let the girls play some Duke Nukem 3D and so on. Fun times. I made all the cables myself (BNC with terminators).
4. no computer is alike: "the one in a dozen problem"
>When I was IT apprentice in hardware departement, I got a dozen identical laptops. I installed 11 of them without a problem. But the last one... There was some problem with the PCMCIA and its drivers. Every Laptop was exactly the same and I had to reinstall this b**** like 5 times. It gave me headaches. Somewhere, I found a different driver version and it worked "magically". Perhaps the PCMCIA was wrong labelled or something. Must've been something like this.
> Also in apprenticeship: To save some time during installation, I used "quick format". I've never done this before, because I always wanted to go "safe". Well, this time I didn't because I had much to do. All colleages did the same. All of us (a dozen people) had the exact same PC. Every component was the same. I installed this PC a couple of times before - never had a problem. Well, after quick format, it hang at around 28 minutes left. We went to lunch break because I thought it might resolve itself. Nooope. It still hang at the exact same point when I came back.
Imagine... the first and only time to use the darned quick format and then the installation didn't want to continue. What are the odds? I waited for another couple of minutes and then I reinstalled again - this time with formating the HDD normally.
5. another funny story:
I mocked one of my colleages because back in the 80286 days, he bought Cache for hundreds of bucks for his PC. According to him it didn't do ****.
He also had to make quite some effort to get the cache, too. A year or so ago, I wrote him a message about some genius hardware related offers. (he wanted to buy a new GPU and waited for VEGA). Well, he opened the mail and there's some nice picture of old 80286 cache in there.
Well, he got even at the christmas party. He gave a gift to me and I unpacked it. Took me 10 minutes or so and at the end - what did I find? Yea, you probably figured. One of those cache chips