• rekabis@lemmy.ca
    47·
    9 hours ago

    Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

    I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

    I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

    Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      26·
      8 hours ago

      “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage, discovering what Technical Support would be dealing with a century or more later.

    • X@piefed.worldEnglish
      21·
      9 hours ago

      They could say “the connection is probably lost,” but it’s more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.