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Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

Nextgrid 5y ago
As a child I remember shielding my face and being scared when I tried booting a computer and seeing the Windows 95 boot logo (with the red/blue/green/yellow squares) on screen as it reminded me of CDs and I heard that lasers were harmful. I was probably 4 at the time though.
npinguy 5y ago
> It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time. The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me. Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened. 1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!" 2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless. 3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately. 4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened. 5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact". Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me. There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like. But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.
- professoretc 5y ago
  > What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? Perhaps we should be asking, what subjects are we failing to be introspective about now, that will fall into this category 10, 20, 30 years in the future?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
npilk 5y ago
I remember seeing this dialog as a kid (probably ~5 years old) and being scared the computer would blow up. Actually, for years, I assumed I must have dreamt it.
pram 5y ago
It seems kinda hyperbolic, but then again the death chime on Power Macs scared the hell out of me as a kid.
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  Some of those death chimes were pretty ominous! Depending on the model, there there a few different dirges, breaking glass, car crashes, and others. You knew you were in for a bad time. https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/ https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/
- mjhagen 5y ago
  They still scare me!
datavirtue 5y ago
Nope. I too have seen users freak out about illegal operations.
- Izkata 5y ago
  I was that user as a kid.
- SilasX 5y ago
  And cookies: >>Almost every time, however, something unexpected would occur, causing her to panic and call her daughter for help. >>"It could be almost anything," Widmar said. "She goes apeshit whenever a pop-up window comes up. And one time, she paged me because she got a message about accepting cookies. She was all freaked out because now she thought she was being charged for actual cookies." https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphean-ordeal-1819566480 https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphe... Yes, a satire article, but representative of how people reacted to such cryptic browser messages.
  - foldr 5y ago
    >"For practice, I logged onto Yahoo! and had her search for cheesecake recipes," Widmar said. "She got totally confused by the fact that we were searching within a web site for other web sites. She kept typing her keyword searches into the Internet Explorer address bar, not into the Yahoo! search bar. Then, when she accidentally typed 'cheesecake' into the Explorer box, it actually worked, because there happened to be a web site called that, so that just confused her even more." This part was pretty prophetic for 2002.
- amatecha 5y ago
  When I was a young kid, my family visited another family for a party at their house. I was trying to play SimCity or something on their computer, and the family's son, a bit younger than me, was there with me. Some error was coming up and I was trying to make it retry, but the computer kept beeping. The son was like "you're hurting it!" and got really upset that I was making the computer beep. I mean, I was a bit older and had a real laugh, but he was genuinely concerned for the well-being of the computer! IIRC he even ran to his parents because I was "hurting" the computer hahah
specialist 5y ago
As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which allows most of humanity to coexist. I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up and unplugged his computer. Retelling that story now, I feel just a bit of remorse. -- Oh, another example, probably apocryphal. At the dawn of cinema, audiences were said to recoil the first time they saw a disembodied head, like when you cutaway for a close up.
- amatecha 5y ago
  Ahhh yeah, a friend of mine made a boot floppy that echoed something like "Erasing C:\ ..." and maybe listing out filenames (hard to remember). I think he set some option so it wouldn't listen to keyboard input so you couldn't interrupt it? He found it absolutely hilarious, though I never got to see the prank in action, haha
amatecha 5y ago
Yeah, nah, it's not an exaggeration. Even as a kid the first time I saw "illegal opeation" on a Windows machine I thought it meant something actually unlawful had occurred. In the early 90's there was a prank Extension for Mac OS called "Radiation" and a partner application called "Trigger". Trigger would allow you to pop up a system alert dialog box over the Appletalk network on whichever machine had the Radiation extension installed, allowing some nice pranking opportunities. The default message was "The radiation shield on your Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet." … It worked, and some people would literally jump away from their desk when they saw this message! Ahh, the good old days hahaha :) (If you're still skeptical, I can probably dig up a copy of this software since I surely have it on an old disk somewhere, but of course I can't prove people moved away from the computer -- there's only my anecdote to go by here haha)
Macha 5y ago
I definitely encountered novice users puzzled and worried about the "illegal operation" message.
- hnick 5y ago
  I have always hated this phrasing. I prefer invalid or something that doesn't invoke legality.
jlokier 5y ago
When I first got a Nigerian scam email, I thought it was a genuine request for help... Happens to us all.

Nextgrid 5y ago

As a child I remember shielding my face and being scared when I tried booting a computer and seeing the Windows 95 boot logo (with the red/blue/green/yellow squares) on screen as it reminded me of CDs and I heard that lasers were harmful. I was probably 4 at the time though.

npinguy 5y ago

> It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time. The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me. Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened. 1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!" 2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless. 3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately. 4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened. 5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact". Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me. There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like. But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.

professoretc 5y ago
> What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? Perhaps we should be asking, what subjects are we failing to be introspective about now, that will fall into this category 10, 20, 30 years in the future?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

npilk 5y ago

I remember seeing this dialog as a kid (probably ~5 years old) and being scared the computer would blow up. Actually, for years, I assumed I must have dreamt it.

pram 5y ago

It seems kinda hyperbolic, but then again the death chime on Power Macs scared the hell out of me as a kid.

logbiscuitswave 5y ago
Some of those death chimes were pretty ominous! Depending on the model, there there a few different dirges, breaking glass, car crashes, and others. You knew you were in for a bad time. https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/ https://512pixels.net/2021/04/mac-chimes-of-death/
mjhagen 5y ago
They still scare me!

datavirtue 5y ago

Nope. I too have seen users freak out about illegal operations.

Izkata 5y ago
I was that user as a kid.
SilasX 5y ago
And cookies: >>Almost every time, however, something unexpected would occur, causing her to panic and call her daughter for help. >>"It could be almost anything," Widmar said. "She goes apeshit whenever a pop-up window comes up. And one time, she paged me because she got a message about accepting cookies. She was all freaked out because now she thought she was being charged for actual cookies." https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphean-ordeal-1819566480 https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphe... Yes, a satire article, but representative of how people reacted to such cryptic browser messages.
- foldr 5y ago
  >"For practice, I logged onto Yahoo! and had her search for cheesecake recipes," Widmar said. "She got totally confused by the fact that we were searching within a web site for other web sites. She kept typing her keyword searches into the Internet Explorer address bar, not into the Yahoo! search bar. Then, when she accidentally typed 'cheesecake' into the Explorer box, it actually worked, because there happened to be a web site called that, so that just confused her even more." This part was pretty prophetic for 2002.
amatecha 5y ago
When I was a young kid, my family visited another family for a party at their house. I was trying to play SimCity or something on their computer, and the family's son, a bit younger than me, was there with me. Some error was coming up and I was trying to make it retry, but the computer kept beeping. The son was like "you're hurting it!" and got really upset that I was making the computer beep. I mean, I was a bit older and had a real laugh, but he was genuinely concerned for the well-being of the computer! IIRC he even ran to his parents because I was "hurting" the computer hahah

specialist 5y ago

As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which allows most of humanity to coexist. I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up and unplugged his computer. Retelling that story now, I feel just a bit of remorse. -- Oh, another example, probably apocryphal. At the dawn of cinema, audiences were said to recoil the first time they saw a disembodied head, like when you cutaway for a close up.

amatecha 5y ago
Ahhh yeah, a friend of mine made a boot floppy that echoed something like "Erasing C:\ ..." and maybe listing out filenames (hard to remember). I think he set some option so it wouldn't listen to keyboard input so you couldn't interrupt it? He found it absolutely hilarious, though I never got to see the prank in action, haha

amatecha 5y ago

Yeah, nah, it's not an exaggeration. Even as a kid the first time I saw "illegal opeation" on a Windows machine I thought it meant something actually unlawful had occurred. In the early 90's there was a prank Extension for Mac OS called "Radiation" and a partner application called "Trigger". Trigger would allow you to pop up a system alert dialog box over the Appletalk network on whichever machine had the Radiation extension installed, allowing some nice pranking opportunities. The default message was "The radiation shield on your Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet." … It worked, and some people would literally jump away from their desk when they saw this message! Ahh, the good old days hahaha :) (If you're still skeptical, I can probably dig up a copy of this software since I surely have it on an old disk somewhere, but of course I can't prove people moved away from the computer -- there's only my anecdote to go by here haha)

Macha 5y ago

I definitely encountered novice users puzzled and worried about the "illegal operation" message.

hnick 5y ago
I have always hated this phrasing. I prefer invalid or something that doesn't invoke legality.

jlokier 5y ago

When I first got a Nigerian scam email, I thought it was a genuine request for help... Happens to us all.