IP: quote without comment...

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> From THE WEEKLY UNIX NEWSPAPER
London, February 16-20, 1998
Issue Number 667


On Friday the 24th, I was watching the NASA Channel on cable TV to
see how the experiments and Shuttle crew were doing.  The men on
board needed to send some adjusting instructions to the automated
setups doing experiments in the cargo bay, and they were using a
laptop to do the sending.  As some of you may have heard, there was
a "computer problem" on board as reported by CNN.  The dialog
between the crew and the Johnson Space Center (JSC) went something
like this:


Crew: Urgent, Johnson, we can't get a DOS prompt!
JSC:  Press "C:<enter>". 
Crew: Heck, we're not familiar with all this.
JSC:  What screen are you looking at? 
Crew: It says "My Computer", and, er, various other icons.
JSC:  Click on "Start", and then "Shutdown". 
Crew: You click the "Start" button to shut down? 
JSC:  Yeah.  Isn't it obvious? 
Crew: Somebody get me an aspirin.
JSC:  Just hit the damn "Start" button. 
Crew: We can't do that.  It didn't load a mouse.
JSC:  Didn't load any mouse at all? 
Crew: Well, yeah, a PS/2 or something.  But we don't have one of
      those.
JSC:  Okay.  Press Alt + Esc. 
Crew: And what does that do? 
JSC:  It should help. 
Crew: Negative.
JSC:  Stand by, will attempt to replicate the problem down here. 
Crew: Roger.


<Long Pause>


JSC:  Okay then.  Double-click on the MS-DOS icon. 
Crew: I don't have a mouse.
JSC:  Go to the backup plan. 
Crew: Which is what? 
JSC:  Dock with the Russians.  They have a Unix workstation you can
      borrow.