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The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver
- C1sc0cat 7y agoGreat story though you could have just pulled out the switch and soldered the wires together :-) I look forward to the practical soldering test for developers at FANG's - every one on here can solder right.
- kop316 7y agoThat was my reaction too. Maybe I just work much more in hardware, but if I came across that issue, I would have just pulled out the wires for the switch and soldered a new one on there. Is there something I am missing?
- nevertoolate 7y agoI know a guy who used a machine with case off, and turned it on by touching the power button legs with a screwdriver...
- ranger207 7y agoI did that for a couple of days when the power button cable was just too short to reach the header.
- timdiggerm 7y agoJust that it's funny
- kop316 7y agoFair enough. I should probably just enjoy a story for a story.
- SAI_Peregrinus 7y agoNo solder needed, the front power switch plugs in to the motherboard using a typical DuPont 0.1" connector.
- regularfry 7y agoThe odds of knackering something else on an irreplaceable machine while you're in there. Yes, it's small. No, it's probably not worth the risk.
- meddlepal 7y agoWell the part you're missing is that if these folks were anything like me and just pure software people they probably pronounce it "soul-der" and would look at a soldering iron with deep concern and confusion. Seriously, I have no idea how to solder so it wouldn't even come to mind.
- umvi 7y agoThis is why I think CS degrees should require at least EE 101 or Computer Engineering 101. Soldering is such a basic skill that is super valuable. And it's not hard: 1. Plug in soldering iron 2. Wait 3. Touch tip of iron to metal you want to fuse with 1 hand 4. Touch solder to tip of iron with other hand 5. Remove iron once desired amount of solder has melted into place It only takes an hour or two to go from solder noob to pro.
- meddlepal 7y agoIt wouldn't help me very much lol, I have a philosophy degree.
- klyrs 7y agoLet your degree define what you can do. Never let it define what you cannot do. I'm a mathematician, doctor of philosophy, and my mom taught me to solder at around age 10. I've done some embedded systems work that involved etching my own PCBs and soldering circuits...
- kop316 7y agoI agree with the other comment! The best time to learn is now. You're never too old.to learn about how all of this works.
- meddlepal 7y agoOh I agree, but I've never really been a hardware tinkerer though... that's not what I get enjoyment from so I don't really think about that stuff too much. I'll probably pick it up eventually... maybe.
- wlesieutre 7y agoNo soldering required, the motherboard wants a momentary contact to tell it to boot. Soldering the wires together would be more like pressing and holding it.
- krallja 7y agoThat’s true for ATX cases, but remember that this is the build machine for Excel 97 East Asian Languages. It’s probably an AT case.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAh, TIL. So AT cases had a maintained toggle button on the front that had to stay depressed, and the computer shuts off when it's released? I suppose that makes more sense for the screwdriver keeping it powered on. I was figuring it was something like a momentary button sticking and the long hold causing a force shut down.
- jdsully 7y agoNot only that but the switch toggled line voltage that fed the power supply. Off meant off in those days.
- wlesieutre 7y agoAh, the first computer I remember had the hard power switch on the back and a button on the front to turn them on, but that would've been early/mid-90's.
- jdsully 7y agoThe ATX standard was released in 1995 and it took a few years for them to become common. Are you sure it wasn't the late 90s. Time-frames get hazy this far back, its actually not improbable these Office '97 machines are ATX.
- bdcravens 7y ago> I look forward to the practical soldering test for developers at FANG's This seems equivalent to whiteboarding algorithms that you'll never use. FWIW, I'm 42, have built and repaired many, many computers over the years, dating to 286's, and I've never picked up a solder iron.
- dotancohen 7y agoI'm also 42, and just recently starting picking up the soldering iron for Arduino projects. Never needed it in two decades of software development or general computer maintenence, including quite a few builds.
- ken 7y agoAs they say, the only way to know you'll never need something is to learn it. I'm not older than you and I've had to solder several times at work.
- cek 7y agoHeh, thanks for making me feel old. I was repairing Apple ][s when you were in the womb.
- bdcravens 7y agoI wish more people would make me feel young here :-)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- piinbinary 7y agoThat reminds me of the story about the magic switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
- kstrauser 7y agoLast week, a PC in my wife's medical office wouldn't boot, with the dreaded "no drive detected" error message. Figuring "what do we have to lose", I turned it off cracked the case, started whacking the C: drive with a screwdriver handle, and punched the power. It booted. The office manager who was watching me had to pick her jaw up off the floor. We proceeded to copy everything possibly important off it onto a USB drive, knowing that may well have been its last spin-up ever and it's next power off may be the final one.
- duxup 7y agoWhile in college I worked tech support for a pc manufacturer. Western Digital had a 1G drive that regularly would just seize up due to some sort of issue. The short term fix was exactly as you describe. Give the drive a few strong hits and it would resume spinning.
- abawany 7y agoI had to do this with a Quantum drive in an old 90s Mac - my approach was to hold it horizontally and rotate the drive aggressively to try to unstick the platters. Worked well but we also copied stuff off of it asap after that.
- kstrauser 7y agoOMG that reminded me! Someone sold me a cheap 50MB HD in the late 90s (it was probably full of dubiously obtained files or such). It would teeeechnically spin up, but my Amiga was pulling about 50KB per second off of it, and it made a grinding bearing sound. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I flipped it over and squirted a little 3-in-1 oil into the bearing. RRRRNGNGNGGNGGGGGRRRRRRRRMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm..... ...as the grinding slowly morphed into the high pitched whine of a happy SCSI drive, and the drive transfer meter crept up to a reasonable 1MB per second. I got the files off of it with a quickness, then threw it away. Yes, I have officially, in front of witnesses, sped up a computer by oiling it.
- wiredfool 7y agoBack in early 90's, a friend had a 20Mb hard drive with stiction problems that wouldn't spin up. We wound up putting it on a radiator, and that warmed it up enough that it would spin up and be a working hard drive. Didn't store anything important on it after that, but it did stay running for a couple of months in that state.
- bdamm 7y agoThe amusing but strange sub-story here is the build engineer claiming that the product may never be built. That is a type of endemic first class whining the type of which I am sick, sick, sick of.
- PhaseLockk 7y agoTo me, that appeared to simply be effective communication. Raising a potentially serious issue early rather than waiting until all options have been exhausted and giving the security lead no time to react. Had they not been able to succeed, the advance notice could help in getting other resources moving in advance of the internal or external deadline.
- bdamm 7y agoInability to power on a build machine is not a serious issue. It is a temporary problem with many solutions. To suggest that the build may never happen would imply a much more serious problem. That does not seem like effective communication, it seems like reckless panic to me. Perhaps they thought the motherboard was fried. Even then it would be irresponsible to suggest that the build could not happen. Certainly communicating that there is a problem is a good thing, but offering up the possibility of no resolution when the diagnostic is only just beginning is not.
- DuskStar 7y agoAnd if the issue was that the machine ate a power surge at some point and the hard drive (+other components) was fried? It may have no longer been practical to recreate and QA that build machine...
- dang 7y agoOk, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not ragey ones. You could make a good comment out of this by replacing the second sentence with some more specific observations.
- chungy 7y agoOffice 97 actually gives me a little bit of nostalgia. It's the last version for me that actually felt pleasant to use (assuming you turn off Clippy, which isn't much of a barrier).
- rat9988 7y ago>assuming you turn off Clippy, which isn't much of a barrier It was a high barrier for my young self.
- frabert 7y agoWhen I was a little kid and started using computers for the first time, Office 97 was one of the only programs installed on my family's PC. I swear the only reason I ever opened Office was for Clippy and its fellow animated characters :)
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoPeak Office imo is whichever Office version introduced that blue underline that let you immediately undo whatever frustrating autoformatting catastrophe was just inflicted by hitting the tab key or resizing an image. I think it was 2002? Everything afterwards feels like change for change's sake. But I haven't used any version after 2016, thankfully, so maybe they finally got collaborative online editing or less obtuse revision tracking.
- rootsudo 7y agoThe fun part is that there is def a disconnect between the dev team and hardware itself (or help desk). To resolve the issue, you only needed to short two jumpers on the motherboard to get it to turn on. If it was a NON-ACPI hardware, then the hardware switch was wired into the power supply itself, which, then again you could've undone the cable and connect the circuit to boot the computer.
- PowerfulWizard 7y agoYeah I used a computer for years with no case, to turn it on all you have to do is briefly short 2 pins on the front panel connector. Although once inside a case it can be pretty awkward to access.
- walshemj 7y agoThis is how you start a pc today when you are diy building it. The first stage is testing that the MB will boot to bios outside the case
- PowerfulWizard 7y agohmm not a bad idea, I've never done it, I always assemble inside the case. And then after the loud beeping sound, check around to find which connectors I've missed.
- bdcravens 7y agoBack when I had some Bitcoin GPU rigs (2011), my setup used 2 wires connecting those jumpers to a cheap push button switch.
- hawkesnest 7y agoI would imagine that a build machine for Office 97 would be of the pre-ATX days and have the switch wired directly to the power supply. Like a clicker-style pen, those power buttons were often push-on-push-off, and occasionally the mechanism would break. Jamming something, like a screwdriver, into the power switch hole would be a completely acceptable thing to do for a one-off. It probably took a little time for the initial panic to wear off and allow the folks doing the build to realize it was a simple matter. The thought "we may not be able to" is a bit of a reach. At worst they could swap power supplies or whatnot.
- IronWolve 7y agoAmazed nobody thought of virtualizing the old hardware.
- ohazi 7y agoIn 1997?
- bdcravens 7y agoThis wasn't in 1997. Article is talking about patching Excel 97 years after it came out, which is why all the build machines were dormant and turned off. Based on when the team moved (follow link in story), this would have been after 2007.
- regularfry 7y agoThat predates Hyper-V, and I suspect qemu or virtualbox would have been a challenge. VMWare, though...
- TomMarius 7y agoI used VirtualBox heavily in 2007, worked flawlessly
- beering 7y agoI'm surprised there weren't backups they could've restored? If the difficulty was setting up the build environment correctly, then even a duplicate hard drive for each build server would've saved them from a pinch.
- Theodores 7y agoTurning off the computer or putting it in suspend mode is somewhat expected nowadays unless it is a server in a rack that runs untold virtual machines that get 'spun up' as needed. Back in 1997 the idea of turning of an specialist idle PC that consumed company electricity was not the done thing to do. If you were a lowly office worker using Office 97 or its ancestors then you would turn off your machine at the end of the day and start the day with a ten minute boot time. It took a long time to get these efficiencies right and a silly amount of time was wasted. CRT monitors ruled the roost back then too, after 6 you would see lots of silly Microsoft OpenGL screensavers running. I wonder what the actual power consumption is these days compared to then? It could be a factor of ten.
- michaelhoffman 7y agoOffice 97 is older than my undergraduate students. That's so weird.
- klyrs 7y agoIn high school, circa '97, I was working in a computer lab. As I entered the room, I was rapidly admonished "don't touch the table!" So naturally, I reached out, tenderly as possible, brushed the table with my fingertip. Sure enough, the computer immediately reboots. He cusses a blue streak, as he's been trying to install Windows but folks kept touching the table! I regret not talking him through the issue, because obviously nobody would use such a flaky machine... but I'd (quite reasonbly) lost his goodwill in my initial mischeviousness. To this day I don't know how the machine was so sensitive to, presumably, a miniscule change in capacitance. There's a possibly that it wasn't grounded and I was carrying a nontrivial electrostatic charge, but the table surface was insulating!