kengr

*sigh*

I was good friends with the manager and the "tech support" person at the Radio Shack Computer Center back in the 80s.

I was talking with the tech support person one day and she told me about one long term problem she finally solved with this one customer.

TRS-DOS had this built-in capability to limit backup copies of programs. Basically as part of the file properties, there was a byte that got checked when you did a "backup" (equivalent of MS-DOS's DISKCOPY) of a floppy.

If the byte was 255 (the default) the file was "unlimited". If the value was 1-254, it got decremented by one, and the copy had it set to 0. If it was zero, the file wasn't copied.

So, on to the problem.
This one customer kept having his backups of the business program he was using go bad.

So he'd have to bring in the master disk and she'd have to reset the number of backups.

She'd talked him thru the backup process over the phone many times and was about ready to pull her hair out.

She'd been on the phone with him yet another time, going thru things step by step. Having him go into excruciating detail.

cust: "It says backup complete. I take the master out of drive 0 and put it back in the sleeve in the binder."

tech: "Ok, sounds good."

cust: "I take the backup out of drive 1 . put it in the sleeve and stick it up on the file cabinet"

tech: "Wait a sec. 'Stick it up on the file cabinet?"

cust: "Yeah, I take it out of the drive, put it in the sleeve and use this magnet to stick it to the side of the file cabinet..."

tech (with *great* restraint): "Ok, I think we've found the problem.."