Sh*t! Sh*t sh*t
Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? where readers share their panic-inducing moments of tech support cock-ups.
This week, we meet “Adrian”, who was consulting for a local weekly newspaper in the 1980s when he nearly destroyed 20 or so people’s work with one keyboard click.
The newspaper had a multi-user CP/M system with two mirrored 5MB eight-inch hard drives and input was achieved by a few terminals connected by RS232.
The system was always referred to as “the server” and was used to assemble the paper’s copy for each weekly issue, which was a very involved process.
“This was pre-DTP and everything was keyed to this system by the editorial and advertising teams,” Adrian explained.
“It was then output to an imagesetter for hand-pasting – literally pasting with something like wallpaper paste – of the page sections before being photographed, after which plates were etched to mount on the roller press. The photographs were processed using a halftone camera.”
Adrian said that this was actually quite a sophisticated set-up for the time, as only a year before, the pages were set by hand using case type.
On the day in question, Adrian was asked to check the system and come up with ways to improve it.
“The terminals were Olivetti micros running some CP/M variant and the typing software was quite limited – just a text editor,” Adrian said. “I noticed that the main system had WordStar on it but this was not used.”
He reckoned that by using it, the users would get a better experience, so he thought about how to do it.
“I had installed quite a number of WordStar CP/M systems and was familiar with the installation process, which involved a few utilities, one of which was the CP/M winform.com,” he said.
“This gave information about the WordStar installation and could change the drive usage (in those days, floppy disks with a choice of using one or two).
