What is your worst IT Day?

[Galaxiom]

demo floppy disk (3.5" when those really were floppy), with the installation instructions stapled to it....

LOL

But that would have been a 5.25 inch floppy with the cardboard outer. Yes they were literally floppy.

The 3.5" was a big advancement. It had a plastic case and doubled the storage capacity from 360KB to a whopping 720KB. I paid four dollars each for the first ones I bought (in 1988?) Back then four dollars could buy a nice lunch and still have change.

 

[ChipperT]

LOL

But that would have been a 5.25 inch floppy with the cardboard outer. Yes they were literally floppy.

The 3.5" was a big advancement. It had a plastic case and doubled the storage capacity from 360KB to a whopping 720KB. I paid four dollars each for the first ones I bought (in 1988?) Back then four dollars could buy a nice lunch and still have change.

You are right, of course. Except it was a 320K 5.25 floppy. The IBM PC we had, had two of them (the 5GB hard drive came much later and cost us $1,500.00). DBase I would run from that floppy, as would Lotus 1-2-3 (and have room for several spreadsheets). The PC had 64K of memory. Ah, the stories I could tell you!

 

[Galaxiom]

the 5GB hard drive came much later and cost us $1,500.00).

Yes we are both stumbling on detail.
The hard disk was no doubt a 5 MB drive.

$300 per Megabyte in something that had almost as much in common with farm machinery as it woud with modern storage devices.

The advance of storage in computing is spectacular with half a million megabytes now costing a hundred dollars.

DBase I would run from that floppy, as would Lotus 1-2-3 (and have room for several spreadsheets). The PC had 64K of memory. Ah, the stories I could tell you!

And the whole operating system could be stored on a floppy. A single human could even hope to read the entire code involved.

 

[PNGBill]

We learn't 6 years ago that hard disk storage was cheaper than shelving and have nearly scanned all our records.

Estimate our data should weigh over 6 tonne.

Use two monitors and have gone from printer toner lasting 6 weeks to now 12 months. Cost of toner in one year paid for the additional 4 screens.

 

[oumahexi]

Today is one of my worst.

Job 1: The ugly head of "no 'king documention" rises again!
Job 2: Reports stopped running - supplier dropped the tables and created new ones that bear no resemblence!

 

[kevlray]

Some years ago I worked for an entertainment software company. The install of some of our games required several floppy disks (3.5's in this case). For some reason the auto install of the program did not always work, so we had do what we called a manual install. Here is a brief replay of conversation.

Caller: I have such and such game and cannot get it installed.
Me: Okay, lets do what we call a manual install, first we will copy all of the disks to your computer and then run a program that will complete the install process.
(I walk the caller thru the copy process and start the program to complete the process, I know that the process will take a while so I chat with the caller).
Caller: (beep)
Me: What was that sound?
Caller: I just rebooted my computer.
Me: Why?
Caller: I thought it was taking too long.
Me: After the computer boots up, we will need to start the process over from the beginning (quiet curses).