4 ms·
I've done a similar thing a few years ago Ha - I'll bet everybody here has a story that starts like that. (Although your heroic save was heroic!) My sad dele
by Vivtek 15y ago
I've done a similar thing a few years ago
Ha - I'll bet everybody here has a story that starts like that. (Although your heroic save was heroic!)
My sad delete story was in 1982 - I had a fantastic graphical robot-vs.-robot game stored on tape on an HP portable computer (I was in high school). For some reason, the delete command on the HP had a variant that deleted from a given block forward on the tape, as I recall, and for some other reason, my fingers just decided to type that variant even though I had never done it before.
I still miss that game. It just may have grown in my memory, but I'm pretty sure that was the coolest piece of software ever written anywhere at any time.
- chops 15y agoI'm pretty sure that was the coolest piece of software ever written anywhere at any time. Hah! I literally (not figuratively) laughed for a minute at that. I'm still smiling a few minutes later. Well played. Let's mourn together at the memories of long lost code.
- AndyKelley 15y agoLet's mourn together at the memories of long lost code. I'll drink to that.
- noonespecial 15y agoMine was plugging in the power connector backwards on a super important ide drive (it was the only backup for an already failed server) and watching smoke issue from its controller board. Having to explain what I'd done to the boss was so scary, I slunk home with the drive and traced the power circuit with my oscilloscope until I found a capacitor that had blown short. I soldered on a through-hole replacement and it worked! I pulled the data and felt like king of the whole frikkin world for the next week or so.
- mkramlich 15y ago>Mine was plugging in the power connector backwards on a super important ide drive (it was the only backup for an already failed server) and watching smoke issue from its controller board. yep this could cause you to lose a job. > Having to explain what I'd done to the boss was so scary, I slunk home with the drive and traced the power circuit with my oscilloscope until I found a capacitor that had blown short. I soldered on a through-hole replacement and it worked! pulling this off, however, could land you a job! lesson: mistakes are human. talent and initiative are rare.
- bphogan 15y agoMy gosh that's one of the best stories I've heard in a long time. The thing that worries me is that things like this are going to me rarer and rarer - there seems to be less interest in electronics, and less electronics that can be hack-fixed like that.
- X-Istence 15y agoI am a software engineer by degree, but also took many electrical engineering courses in uni, and I can honestly say that it is starting to make a comeback. Sparkfun, Adafruit, MAKE and many other places are starting to make it more accessible, cheaper and easy to learn. The Arduino has been a boon, providing people with a cheap but powerful microcontroller to get started. While yes technology is getting smaller I have found that with many parts I can now easily find replacements online, I can get advice from other professionals, I can easily figure out how something works so that I can fix it. I've currently got a power supply sitting on my work bench that has a weird issue and I am slowly going through, making a net list and building a schematic with part numbers in an attempt to isolate the fault. Maybe I am a rare breed, but seeing as how the interest at Maker Faire keeps going up, and interest in electronics also keep going up I will assume that eventually more and more people will get into experimenting in this field. At least that is my hope.
- axelator 15y agoarduino FTW! just getting into it and caused my first electrical fire. :-) good stories.