Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

On Call By the time Friday rolls around, The Register understands readers might just want to toss the rest of the working week away without a care for the consequences. That sense of ennui is why we ease you into the last day of the working week with a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the sometimes-silly side of working in tech support.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Henry" who told us of a job he held in the 1980s at a small electronic engineering company that made and wired up "thundering great control panels for the gas industry."

"Think loads of dials and buttons all eventually controlling machines," Henry urged On Call.

By the time he got this gig, software had also become part of the mix – in the form of a Turbo Pascal package that could read the data from ...