someone told me their sound for meetings was coming out of their hard drive the other day. I knew what they meant but still.
now if it was a floppy drive I could believe them
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Hold up, what did they mean because I cannot translate that
Non-technical people will sometimes refer to whatever piece of plastic or metal that contains electronic components of any sort but does not consist of an LCD display or obvious input device as a “hard drive”. This includes desktop boxes, external modems, docking stations, UPS systems, teleconferencing platforms, and far, far more. If it has das blinkenlights anywhere on it you can expect it to be referred to as a “hard drive” at some point. It will save you a headache if you just mentally translate their “hard drive” to mean “hardware” instead.
Alternatively, if it is a display device (an LCD monitor), expect that to be called either “the computer”, “the server”, or “the internet”.
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Probably the desktop tower. I've seen many people call it a hard drive, but I'm actually not sure how common it is to have speakers in the tower.
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I've literally had to explain the existence of other operating systems than Windows to people. They had never heard of Linux.
Have you ever heard something like saying "His Windows is Linux"?
An upgrade to having never heard of Linux but also a downgrade somehow
A long time ago (I cannot find it anymore, may have been deleted) I read a "tale from tech support" where a user called tech support and complained "my operating system is missing". Retelling from memory:
Tech support person tried to walk the user through various steps until the user said "ok, let me just close these documents…"
"Wait, you have open documents? Your operating system is not missing."
"What? No, it is."
"If your operating system were missing, you wouldn't be able to do anything with your computer, you wouldn't have open documents. If you can do that, you definitely have some operating system. What version of Windows is the computer running?"
"Windows 7."
"There you have it, that's your operating system."
"That's Windows, not operating system."
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If that's true then how come I see non-programmers talk about the somewhat obscure OS developer, Dick Pick, all the time?
I had to describe a web browser to someone the other day at work. In the end they had to go to their IT department for help.
Though sometimes IT departments we deal with aren't much better. Combination of ultra paranoid security policies and incompetence. Then a panicked end user who I need to try and work out how to help with the restrictions in place by their IT department. Some of our customer notes are amusing, stuff like "RDP still works onto X and you can connect to the SQL server from there, don't tell them".
As a former FreeBSD user I feel this often.
I use my own custom made OS called PenOS that doesn't even really work or do anything useful, but it does spam the word PENIS across your screen forever.