An old joke..... - Granite Grok

An old joke…..

IBM 3278

I used to work on this kind of equipment – a "two color" terminal: black background with green characters.  And all that size to act as a terminal – not as a PC!  Yet, as expensive as it was (thousands of dollars), it was a big improvement over the hardcopy terminals of the day.  So, I got a chuckle when I saw this:

It’s the mid-1980s, and the mainframe programmers in this IT shop are all working the way IBM intended: on green-screen terminals.

"The guy next to me came in and fired up his terminal, but the screen stayed dark," says a pilot fish there. "After checking the cables, power and so on, tech support determined the CRT was bad."

So a new monitor is brought in, hooked up, powered up and tested, and it works fine.

As the support tech is preparing to cart off the defective CRT, he asks the user, "Do you want your glare protector?"

Sure, says user.

"He pulled the Velcro-connected glare protector off the old CRT," fish says, "and a black sheet of paper fell out from behind.

"We never found out who among the 50 programmers was responsible."

Thousands of dollars foiled by a penny’s worth of black paper….

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