The timeless, "please visit our website if your Internet is not working" trick.
If someone only has a single Internet-capable device, it is much more likely to be smartphone, rather than a PC running Windows.
Of course it wouldn't have hurt to add: "or call our support number".
It is funnier to me the "we recommend customers restart their PC" bit , which basically it's the first step every IT support ever tells you to do (possibly after "check that the cable is connected").
The proper approach there is tell the person "please unplug the device from the power, wait 10 seconds then plug it back in to let the capacitors discharge".
If you tell people "check the cable is plugged in" they will either tell you "yes of course it is" or else get offended. Telling them to unplug it and plug it back in solves that (and actually might help occasionally too).
The 8042 isn't inside the keyboard but on the motherboard, and the status register inp(100)&2 is clear even when there isn't a keyboard attached.
The way the BIOS detects a keyboard is by sending a command from the 8042 to the keyboard (usually 255; reset and do basic test) and waiting a few seconds for the ACK.
Users often used the keyboard in those days and might want to know that the keyboard itself wasn't plugged in or working before booting up the computer because the keyboard lines (while often robust) didn't actually support hotplug and plugging in a keyboard while the controller was trying to talk to it could actually damage the computer.
Meanwhile some other people used PC hardware as something other than a PC, and in those cases might not want a keyboard attached that can get damaged, so most BIOS actually let you disable the keyboard startup test.
Ah, those were the days. :)
The reason the BIOS stops and says "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue" is to give you a chance to plug in the missing keyboard, so that it can be initialized and supported by the BIOS before continuing to boot.
I think the real reason was:
if (err) {
puts(strerror(err));
puts("Press F1 to continue");
}https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line
And, of course, as pointed by sibling poster, the i8042 is on the motherboard, not in the keyboard.
Of course it was published in 1995.
(I will have to verify the date)
Of course designing a marketing mail such that it doesn't fall afoul of those intrusions is a much better idea.
When an email is composed of text, instead of images, there is never a problem.
I've never had a reader screw up the formatting of a plain text email, nor have I had to click on any links to correctly read the full text of those emails.
Edit: I wanted to add to this that I generally don't unsubscribe from emails that arise from existing relations (signed up for site, etc) as long as they include a "text/plain" part with the message content.
Which is unsurprising. However that is not the world most people live in.
Wait, maybe that's not such a bad world to live in after all...
I'm starting to think that MS secretly wants desktop Windows to die so they can concentrate on server-land OS roles (especially Azure based), Office, and SQL Server. Once their dev tools and office are cross-platform and/or web-based (they seem to be moving that way) they can push people onto Linux/Mac/Other on the desktop and let someone else worry about the intractable problem of maintaining the security of the desktop/tablet OS installs of the filthy masses...