Abort, Retry, Ignore

[crustyasp46]

Abort, Retry, Ignore

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

Was this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.
Carefully, I weighed my options.
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly, I must now adopt one -
Choose: "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

With my fingers pale and trembling,
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee
Finally I pressed a key --
But on the screen what did I see?
Again: "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

I tried to catch the chips off guard --
I pressed again, but twice as hard.
Luck was just not in the cards,
I saw what I had seen before.
Now I typed in desperation,
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation -
Choose: "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted;
Getting up, I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw an awful sight,
A bold and blinding flash of light,
A lightning bolt that cut the night and shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died,
"Oh no -- my database", I cried.
I thought I heard a voice reply,
"You'll see your data-- Nevermore!"

To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes
Perhaps it goes to Heaven where the angels have it stored.
But as for productivity - well,
I fear it has gone straight to Hell.
And that's the tale I have to tell -
Your choice: "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

[Hot Trout]

HAHA, that just about sums up what it was ike to work on the first IBM Model 1 PC's. No hard disk and no option but to use floppies. The other annoying thing was that if you tried a floppy and it did not work, replacing it with another disk and pressing retry did not work either.

Great post Crusty.

[Dragon Mech]

it twas beautiful crusty. *sniff* it reminded me of the good ole days of playing with my Emerson computer. which was an IBM XT clone. swaping out the 5.25 inch double sided disks. playing an early version of microsoft flight simulator. having only 10 funtion keys. those were some of the best (and most frustrating) memories of MS-DOS.