In case the stories so far haven’t helped you realise how fragile IT infrastructure can be, hold on to your hats for the one story that I think every Windows admin will have achieved at some point in their career. My (first) version is on a product called Winframe 1.4 and for those unfamiliar with this product, let me elaborate a little. As per the previous story, there wasn’t really a concept of remote console for Windows at the time. Winframe however was a way of doing this and doing it for multiple users simultaneously on one server - the equivalent today being Terminal Services for Windows.

In theory, at least, the idea of Winframe was to give remote users a desktop on a server, sharing the big server resources giving a performance boost for the user and allowing for cheaper end compute (or dumb terminals/thin clients) as a result. What’s to go wrong?

Administrators. That’s what goes wrong. So on your Winframe server you could have 16, 32, 64 potentially 128 users simultaneously all using the same resources and relying on that service for doing whatever you have allowed them to do, passing them back only what a screen would show. And that’s where the problems really start. If like me, you were effectively God in this world then you have permission to do all sorts of things. Delete files, administer the machine, create users, you name it. When you are looking at one of these screens, particularly on full screen mode, it would really feel like that server was your computer, so much so that it was really, really easy to go File, Shutdown to close your session. Of course now you are not closing a session but shutting down the whole server and disconnecting however many users happened to be happily using the service.

Before anyone starts shouting File? File? Yes I am right, think Windows for Workgroups. This is prior to the days of Start buttons or whatever we call the Windows logo button thingy at the bottom left of your screen today.

I can’t think how many times I have done this. 10s of times probably and yes the problem persists today in the latest iterations of Windows server but there are a few more warnings and back-out opportunities these days!