Quote:
Originally Posted by ScoobsMcGee
"Yeah, they just get stuck sometimes and need a good slap."
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My first technology job was as a "Systems Engineer" that was essentially technical sales support for Anderson-Jacobson (the inventors of the acoustic coupler and a big datacomm company at one point).
They OEMed and rebranded the Hyperion computer (pictured below) built by a Canadian firm (Ottawa I believe) and was a direct competitor with Compaq, having beaten Compaq to market by a couple of months. It was also smaller and lighter than the Compaq. (Lighter being a relative term, it still weighed 18 pounds but was 10 lbs lighter than the original Compaq). The Hyperion cost almost twice as much though, which is why Compaq won out.
Anyway, one of the compatibility tests at the time was would it run Lotus 1,2,3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator. The Hyperion ran flight simulator fine, but had an issue with the IBM version of Lotus because of the on diskette copy protection, so we sold our own "version" version of 123.
That did not satisfy a lot of folks though as they wanted to know it could run the "original" IBM version of 123.
Accidentally, I discovered if you waited until it started making the "grinding" sound as it tried to read the protected diskette and you tapped just right above the top diskette it would get past the copy protection. No idea why it worked but it did. So, in future demos I discretely performed this if someone pulled the disks out.
After we sold them I did take support calls where I let go of the "secret".