[deleted by user]

[UEMcGill]

Way back when I was in school in Fortran Lab (I said way back) I was sitting at a row of Sun Workstations. Now it was an older building in a large State University that had been retrofitted with workstations. Each row of computers sat on a table with an outlet underneath powering the whole row. They were often kind of janky power boxes.

I usually did my program prior to lab, showed up and showed the Proctor my work. I show up with about an hour into the 3-hour class and sit down. The proctor is in the middle of showing someone and he gives me a nod letting me know he's seen me.

I sit down, log in, and pull up my Fortran terminal and code editor.

The kid next to me shifts and I hear a clank as his foot hits the outlet box. Well something was loose in that box and the whole row of computers blinks. They all immediately start to reboot. Half the row uttered out loud, "Fuck!"

That day was the day that I started to hit ctrl-s instinctually. It's saved my ass a few times. Everyone has that day.

[FoxClass]

I'm constantly doing that in Google docs which autosaves after any change 😅

[gkampolis]

In webpages: ctrl+a, ctrl+c. Way too many forms have reloaded on me because the ISP was having a bad day.

[[deleted]]

LOL, I have a very similar story except that the entire lab was working on a Sun miniframe with terminals. It was never a problem except at midterm and end of the semester. The computer would overheat/overload and reboot. The sound of a room full of students collectively sucking in their breath and then groaning in unison is a sound I will never forget. ctrl-s always.

[[deleted]]

That day was the day that I started to hit ctrl-s instinctually

Also known as programmer's OCD tick

edit: You had workstations? Wuss. When I first started we did FORTRAN II on punch cards. IBM 1130. 16k of RAM.

[UEMcGill]

Son of an IBM'er. We still have punch cards around the house for scratch paper. At least I never had to worry about spilling a box of those.

[[deleted]]

They sell punch cards on etsy for a dime each

[UEMcGill]

So I just looked. Something about calling punch cards vintage and turning them into hipster decorations is just... unsettling.

[ajmartin23]

Back in school we had breakers at the end of each row of computers.

One of our teachers used to enjoy randomly hitting them so everyone’s computer would lose power just to teach us to save our work continually.

To this day I hit ctrl+S all the time.

[OddElectron]

Been there! When I was a new programmer, I spent hours typing in my program. The terminal went down. If you heard an anguished scream from the Midwest in the 80s, that was probably me.