Somewhat scary memory

It's late at night, likely past midnight in the mid or late 1990s and you are on AOL looking at that online service's forums or something. Suddenly you get a message that pops up and says "something subsystem will restart in 5 minutes" or something to that effect. And then you get another bix that says "Subsystem rebooting". Any reasonable and fairly knowledgeable person would think that these would be internal system messages that only the employees directly working with the legacy "Stratus" mainframe would see, and the public would be shown a message to the effect of "AOL will experience some downtime between ##:## and ##:## for system maintenance." But instead, the creepy "subsystem rebooting" message gets sent out as is for everyone to see.

I don't know why this message creeped me out so much, despite knowing what it meant. Maybe it's because of it's being in full contrast with the "so easy to use, no wonder it's #1" UX AOL was pushing hard for, the time of night that it typically happened, the plain dialig box with a message for an obscure and archaic even for the time back end system that was in contrast of everything else in the UI, or it's a bit like seeing the technical bits showing through the holes in the skin of a badly maintained and decaying Chuck E Cheese animatronic. But it sure was low level creepy.

---

anonymous Computers May 13, 2025 at 1:15 am 0 0