Why is there a screen that says "It is now safe to turn off your computer"? (2016)
devblogs.microsoft.com
devblogs.microsoft.com
DOS never had an option to shut down, you just saved your work and turned off the computer. Also with Windows 3.x it was normal to just switch the PC off, without any prior shut down process.
Back in the days most software was synchronous, there were no background processes, no write cache (and read cache was optional). Once the "saving document" message was gone, it was written to disk. With floppys and early hard drives it was easy to hear anyway, when the noise stopped it was written to disk.
There was a brief moment when the hardware was advanced enough to reach a safe configuration by itself, and the software was not advanced enough to need to synchronize state with everything.
But maybe there's a lesson there, and the software should be able to shut itself down in a couple of seconds in the background, just like the hardware did.
Probably a lot of people did exit windows 3.x before powering off the computer.
I actually don't think it was required. Windows 3.x was just a shell on top of DOS and didn't do any IO caching. Saving files or closing all applications should've been safe enough.
It has been very frustrating to watch designers ramping up reliance on the side channels by piling functionality into a single button at the same time as the side channels were disappearing and software latency was telescoping so that in present year I frequently have to reverse engineer morse code power button bullshit with 20 seconds of lag in the tight loop before the first audible/visible cue comes through. Is a short press 0.5s-1.5s? Or is that a long press? Is 0-0.5s ignored as debounce or is it a short press? Does a long press suffice for shutdown, or do you need a really long press to trigger hardware shutdown because the software shutdown is unreliable? Is 5 seconds long or really long? AAaaaaaaaaaa
I miss this simplicity. With journaled filesystems, it should be pretty safe to do this.
Few things bother me as much as a computer that takes more than 1500ms to shut down.
Another wrinkle to this is that many computers' power switches were physical switches on the power supply that directly closed or opened the circuit supplying power to the computer. There was no way for the computer to switch itself off like in today's ACPI-mediated world, so the user had to be told when to turn the computer off.
Just goes to show how backward and primitive the PC was until well into the 90s. Macs had been shutting themselves off, and ejecting their floppy drives, since 1984.
Exiting Program Manager before flipping a power switch was always normal operating procedure.
If you killed power in Windows with no regrets you've lived a dangerous life!
Yes. You better were sure that your harddrive light was not blinking, before pressing the power switch.
I think you mean a "personal computer". Apollo DomainOS, at least, had a shutdown command and i presume that also VMS had one.
The problem really comes down to the fact that windows couldn't actually power off the computer like it can today.
I think the message should have said: "Windows shutdown complete. Please power off the computer."
This more clearly implies that not only is it safe to turn off your computer, it's recommended you do so.
Sounds a bit like ordering the user, I guess that's why they went with the other message.
They'd spent the last 10 minutes swearing at windows for taking forever to shutdown and were about 10 seconds from saying screw it, and turning it off anyway.
There's some charm and nostalgia in the computer only having two states - on and off. No standby power, no S1-S4 states, no wake-on-LAN, no management engine, etc. Press the power button - hopefully a chunky rocker switch - and the system is off (minus the RTC battery).
I have an XP machine running on such a motherboard and it too supports the "safe to shutdown" splash. Hibernate also works, so if I really want to, I can put it to "sleep" with no power at all.
My favorite part of this era were those under-monitor power switch gadgets, so you could just leave the AT power switch on as well as the printer, monitor, modem, etc. and have one master power switch that turned everything on or off.
I still have an early '90s IBM PS/1 that was my family's first computer. The only accessories that survived from then are the CH Flightstick and Gravis Gamepad, the original keyboard, mouse, and monitor are long gone (I really regret not having the wonderful original clacky IBM keyboard), but it still works and still boots off its original 129MB hard drive.
If I find one of those power switch things at Goodwill or whatever I'll pick it up without a second thought.
Because wall-power was routed through that switch, quite dangerously, the cable could get pinched in the case.
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-a1x7hg2jgk/images/stencil/12...
The first image is the of the original IBM PC's power supply (or a clone) wherein there's a nice, clunky red switch directly on the power supply.
The second image is of a later AT style power supply where the switch was moved to the front of the chassis/facade. To facilitate this, it runs a pair of wires carrying mains power to the front of the case, which the switch (usually clunky, due to the current) physically toggles mains power into the motherboard.
Almost all personal computers around 1996 were like this.
Probably not too much risk if the XP machine is isolated. There could also be licensing issues with upgrading, as well as unmaintained proprietary software.
It's kind of like a functioning software museum - it has lots of old software and editors I used in the XP days, some games from around 2001, and some programming tools like Visual Studio/Basic, Perl, Python, Mingw/GitBash, Sublime Text, Ruby, etc. The only lang I haven't been able to run so far is NodeJS since it required SSE2 instructions very early on.
It has a 1300MHz Pentium 3 and 384MB of RAM, but with a PCI SATA controller and a modern SSD, it's pretty speedy and capable!
And a usable User Interface, unlike Windows 10 or 11. /s
One can install Windows 98 without ACPI by running setup with the "/pi" switch, alternative one can uninstall the "ACPI PC" device and replace it with "Standard PC" which should disable ACPI. This should cause it to show the shutdown splash even on ATX systems.
There's really this weird bug in human nature, when if people are presented with an action, they cannot help themselves but want to take it, even when they know doing so could be actively detrimental or at best neutral (Click that button, sign this paper).
I myself have noticed doing this (and others manipulating me into doing this!), and I'm trying my best not to act on this impulse.
(Let's not get into the discussion that a lot of graphics designers call themselves UX experts, without actually knowing UX stuff).
My brain automatically starts to move my cursor to the "This is not me" box because it is the standout button. Which is a really good behavioral security experience because my mind was pushed towards the safer option.
The only "eXperience"s in X are pain, frustration and masochism, regardless if it's on Windows, Android or iOS.
That's a somewhat unsatisfactory answer, or more of a software-minded answer. The full answer: Because ATX power was a NEW thing. AT motherboards and power supplies were overwhelmingly still in-use.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/204205/what-...
I think it was at HAL 2001 where I bought a black hoodie with the German version of the orange text "You can now safely throw away your computer" from the CCC merch stand or maybe a different one.
I think it took about 10 years until I got the first comment about this weird text by a young coworker who had never experienced it (and also said something), but it got some chuckles and comments over the years, mostly by people who were definitely old enough to have seen this in person a lot in the late 90s.
I went with a bunch of friends. I fired up Paint on a few PCs and changed the BMP file to say that the computer was “Hacked” and to be prepared (something in that line). In the following demo, they got to that screen, and there was chaos — locked down the room, the frantic shutdown of the expo for hours.
My friends had fun, and they knew then that I knew computers. :-)
Was this actually a real danger at all at some point?
It's obvious that cutting the power without shutdown will lead to data loss of everything not written to persistent storage. But for old PCs, the warning was always that it could also physically damage the PC, e.g. damage the hard drives or something like that. Is this still the case?
I don't remember this being true. I remember it always being about data loss.
The quiet clicking-type drives use a magnetic voice coil-type actuator, and the loss of power causes them to want to spring back to the park position.
You'll notice most laptops refuse to update their firmware without the battery reasonably fully charged, and the power adapter plugged in. This is why.
And then we get into the definition of "irreversible." Yes, you can recover from this with an external SPI flasher, if you can get the firmware image into the proper state for the SPI flash, or have an image from before. But most people don't have this option.
As for hard drives, I'm of the impression that most newer drives will handle a power cut by using the inertia left in the platters and the motor-as-generator long enough to drive the heads back to a safe position, but I've not done any sort of in depth experimentation on it. A drive with a parking ramp for the heads (or a parking track) has those things for a reason, and "scraping the coating as the drive spins up somewhere in the data section" isn't good for drive longevity.
I recently did this with one of my Thinkpads, doing it during a battery firmware update among others. I wasn't successful in finding such a solution though. Where have you had success in finding some of the more obscure repair techniques?
And it was a real danger before for the running sofware system, I think modern filesystems are more resilient against this sort of problem.
Never heard of actual physical damage though, but I didn't live that era much, can just barely remember the screen in TFA.
But the filesystems normally used on PCs at the time didn't have journalling or other mechanisms to prevent metadata damage if the power was turned off in the middle of a metadata update, which made data loss that much more likely even for blocks that were already written.
If you do it one time, no. But, I wouldn't try it too many times.
(do you know Windows 10 has "online checkdisk" - and doesn't work. Ask me how i found out)
The computer has its own agenda and agency, and increasingly the user's wishes are unimportant. We've been conditioned to ask the computer to do things rather than command it.