Tumbling down the internet's memory lane led us to an iconic find: This spring is the 30th anniversary of the Really Big Button That Does Absolutely Nothing! 🔴

At the time, Paul Mitchell observed: "I think there’s something wrong with the Big Red Button. It doesn’t seem to do anything."

You have no idea what this is? We're here to help. It's a '94 relic is the epitome of internet randomness. Experience it here: https://krystalrose.com/rosewood/library/BigButton.htm

#InternetHistory #Internet #BigRedButton #mastodon

Since we're telling #BigRedButton stories...

Very early in my career, I was a SOC monkey for a small local Internet & data center hosting provider. Our Big Red Button was mounted on the wall of the data center, just beyond the door, a little over 6' off the ground - low enough to reach up and hit it, high enough to avoid accidentally bumping into it... Or so we thought.

The company was small enough that our founder and CEO was still very hands-on - to the point that he was helping a brand-new employee carry a heavy server into the data center for installation one day. $newGuy - who was about 6'4" - walks backwards through the door into the data center, backs up against the wall so $CEO can swing the server around to go down the aisle... And hits the Big Red Button with the back of his head.

Instant unplanned production-outage-recovery drill, all hands on deck!

IIRC, our recovery procedure documentation improved a *lot* over the next few days. 🙄 $newGuy totally expected to be fired, but $CEO took full responsibility (one of the reasons I loved working there - the two founders were both fantastic people as well as visionary technogists). And the Big Red Button got a mollyguard, since "high enough to be out of the way" was clearly relative. 🤣

RE: https://dood.net/objects/6b030cfe-14d3-40b4-976a-5a08f0e1c72d
@rossgrady @lauren

Our dogsitter is Not At All Online and hasn’t visited us since we installed the #BigRedButton. He doesn’t know about it. He’ll just see it sat on top of the toilet cistern.

He’s arriving shortly. How long before @hal toots about #BathroomDisco? 🕺🏻

V2 of our #BigRedButton is up and running. From the outside, it seems absolutely no different, but the stuff behind it is waaaay more complicated.

Previously, a song was selected at random every time the button was pressed. So if someone panicked and pressed the button again it would stop the current song and start another one, and then another, and another... not the experience I wanted.

Also, the random selection was not random in the right way. Each time, it picked from the entire list. This meant that it was possible for the same song to be selected on subsequent presses, and some songs never got picked.

It seemed to really like "Let's Get Loud" by JLo.

#HomeAssistant #BathroomDisco