As more and more of the features are electronic I could well believe it. Mastering the interface of my new car is hard work. I’ve a few videos to watch and the manual to scrutinise before a trip to Italy next week. All these wonderful new features are damn all use if you’ve got to press multiple buttons on the steering wheel and flick through pages on the central screen, all at 130 KM. The car has a “personal assistant” which chips in every now and then and says “I can’t help you with that” and then won’t shut up. I’m trying to teach it what piss off means. Maybe I should try “sich verpissen”. If that’s not bad enough it also has Siri through the iPhone and Alexa through the app. I’ve no idea who I’m talking to.
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Ach shame, what a disappointment for us arty types…
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I once accidentally enabled the super-duper latest racing-car-fast version of our operating system costing ££,£££ on a site of the Foreign Office in the course of a much more boring update. Just one box accidentally ticked did it .
I was all alone in their computer room - always the best place to feel cool in those days 
- so the client didn’t know. So I decided to hang around for a bit and watch the new operating system run (I was also a performance specialist, so I was curious to see the effects.).
Well their system sat like a brick and ran no faster - I ran all the checks. So I removed the ££,£££ ugrade by unticking the box. They never knew they’d had the latest and greatest version of our system for a brief while. Their main app was a piece of software we’d also sold them, so now I knew that was a dog and why.
Some time later on another visit their IT Manager was giving me a hard time because he’d acquired some budget and wanted the latest and greatest operating system upgrade. I told him I wasn’t recommending it for their particular software profile. He persisted so I told him exactly what had happened. They were gutted I hadn’t called them into the computer room to see it run but accepted it. Just a risk I hadn’t been able to take, to let them know only 1 bit had to be flipped and they’d get ££,£££ worth of overrated upgrade for free.
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ICL? 1900 series perhaps 
HP 40/42 or 64/68 upgrade. Long ago, can’t renember which. Probably a 42 upgrade. Basically it introduced caching that hadn’t been seen before. Not a CPU upgrade, and many clients were already at maximum memory, apparently the upgrade only benefited apps doing massive i/o or batch/search type stuff. So unless they needed more memory anyway the upgrade was just flipping a very, very expensive switch to click on the new cache handling.
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HP not ICL. They were being very adventures
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