On Call The end of the working week brings with it magical possibilities for fun and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates each Friday with a

OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

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2024-09-30 12:00:05

On Call The end of the working week brings with it magical possibilities for fun and frolics, which is why The Register celebrates each Friday with a fresh incantation of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rohan" who told us of an incident from the late 1990s when a friend operated a bulletin board on a machine that ran IBM's OS/2 Warp operating system.

Rohan visited his friend's home and sat down in front of the OS/2 box. He watched it boot, load several programs, then crash. Then boot, then load programs, then crash.

Rohan quickly figured out why. "The default behavior for OS/2 was to reboot and then restart any programs that were running at the time of the reboot/crash," he told On Call. So the BBS box was behaving as intended, and Rohan could not figure out how to fix it.

"And then – and I will never forget this – he sat in the chair, put his head in his hands, began to rub his temples as if summoning a higher power of OS/2 knowledge, and slowly began to speak."