I remember a cogent comment from a podcast... if you were sent back in time 150 years, you wouldn't recognize much... but one thing you *would* recognize would be a classroom... a bunch of kids in a square room listening to a single adult talking at them... maybe we can do better?

It was 1984 at Carnegie Mellon University... in this era the cutting-edge Microsoft (PC) operating system was MS-DOS 3.0.... it looked like this: http://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/gfx/logo/msdos_screenshot.jpg . In this era, when using Microsoft PC's with MS-DOS it was quite common for people to lose hours of work unless they manually saved their work constantly, even if they did nothing wrong because the the computer often "froze up" with no warning. Anyway, I was trying out the Paint software on the new Mac, which looked like this: http://www.forevergeek.com/wp-content/media/2010/08/MacPaint-Japanese-Girl.png . Keep in mind that at this time there were no hard disks in PC's or Macs... just floppies. I had spent about an hour drawing a picture on the Mac but had not saved my work at all. I stretched my legs a bit under the computer table and my foot accidentally kicked the power cord out of the socket. The computer instantly died. I was bummed that I had lost my picture but I plugged the computer back in and watched it boot up again from the floppy. Did it come up with an error message "your computer was not shut down properly" (which you will see with a Microsoft Windows computer to this very day). No. Did it just boot up normally as if nothing had happened? No. Without a single message and without asking me a single question, it booted directly into the Paint software WITH MY ENTIRE PICTURE INTACT.