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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

imagine hearing one of those clown tunes just as you lost hours of work. I'd be livid.

I loved my Mac at the time! But it was an abusive relationship. Crashes weren't constant, exactly, but they were random and pervasive.

I got trained to automatically save my file at every single pause in my typing. Finish a sentence? Command-S. Minor edit? Command-S. Paste? Command-V, Command-S. I only noticed when I moved to another computer and muscle memory stopped working.

I remember playing with 3D Studio Max on windows 95 I think as a teenager after waiting for it to download over dialup for days. Windows 95 was generally sort of OK but it only ran on 95 in theory as it was designed for windows NT. Under 95 it crashed every 30 minutes so after every step I did I compulsively hit save. I don't think I have even really broken that habit at this point. Thus began the multi day wait to download windows NT as well.

> I got trained to automatically save my file at every single pause in my typing.

Growing up with home computers in the 80s, I still have this habit. I suspect (without evidence) that it's pretty common. :)

Same here, though replace "Command+S" with "F2"(DOS)/"Ctrl+S"(Win). Also counting to 10 before turning off the PC because of software-based disk write cache :-P

> software-based disk write cache

Linux users of a certain era had to overcome compulsive use of 'sync ; sync ; sync' for much the same reason.

I used to do the same on our Windows 95 box, and later 98 and 2000s. Hard habit to break to be honest. 3DS Max, Photoshop, Word, they'd all randomly crash on me for various reasons!

sometimes the crash would happen during the save. then the file was corrupted

These chimes only happened if the device failed the power on self test. These weren't heard in cases similar to what Windows experiences with a BSOD.

You'll never hear them while doing work on the machine (unless you had it opened up and trying to figure out why it wasn't booting).

I completely disagree. These tunes made computer failure a fun and enjoyable experience for the whole family!

so just as bad - hours of work you cannot get to

My Mac's drive died on me during finals crunch in school one semester. I lost a long paper I'd finished the night before - was going to proof it before running over to the lab to print it - and had almost 100 more pages to write.

This was early-90s, maybe 1/4 of the folks in my dorm had personal computers. I spent 4 days using other people's machines while they weren't, because the labs was already booked solid, and still had to take an extension on one paper.

In conclusion, I like preemptive multitasking.

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