On Call: How not to maintain computers

Crossposted from https://beehaw.org/post/24258253

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wilson” who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy.

Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.

“We had a new structural engineer who those of us in the shop quickly identified as an idiot with a degree,” Wilson wrote.

One day, said idiot decided that the computers used to run AutoCAD needed to be cleaned and that the welding shop was the place to do the job.

  • lechekaflan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 day ago

    Besides being expensive, AutoCAD in the 80s needed a lot of floppies to install it, and hard drives at the time were very large but have small space, like about 20mb.

    • GenosseFlosse@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Which PC had a 2mb hard drive? Smallest 286 PCs I can remember already had 20MB, and a floppy disk would hold 720kb or 1.44MB.