Last Windows 3.1 Computer Located

Posted by Michael on 8 May 2005, 07:59 GMT

Several days ago, members of the ticalc.org staff were perusing through the web server statistics as is frequently done. That's when we noticed the line in the Operating System Report: "Windows 3.1". At first glance, this seemed incredulous; no one uses Windows 3.1 anymore. Further research into the actual server logs revealed that indeed, in the past seven days a combination of Internet Explorer 5.0 and Windows 3.1 has requested 90 files from ticalc.org. Magnus Hagander immediately set out on the long and perilous quest to locate this machine.

Saturday morning, Magnus interviewed no less than one hundred and thirty-seven system administrators of various companies, based upon the IP address found in our logs. As of right now, eighty-five of them have been admitted to the hospital for coronary-related ailments. Through the global-spanning resources of the Swedish Mafia, the computer was traced to an "A. Nakranistik", a German hermit.

Mr. Nakranistik refused to answer any of the mafia's questions or to explain why he had visited ticalc.org. By means of a time-tested social ritual involving patellas and kinetic energy, he then changed his mind and consented to the photograph which you can find at the top of this article. From the timestamp on ticalc.org in the photo and the reddish tint of artificial lighting, it is apparent that Adolf Nakranistik is a distressed individual who checks ticalc.org at ungodly hours of the night. Also note the Paint Shop Pro icon in the corner of the screen. Mr. Nakranistik is believed to have used Paint Shop Pro to create his illicit photo collection - graphing calculators posing without wearing slide cases. He has since been taken to an undisclosed location for corrective therapy involving the forced consumption of surstr�mming and lutfisk.

As for the rest of the world, it can breathe easy as the Swedish Mafia has since turned the laptop over to Magnus. When asked what he planned to do with it, Magnus replied that he had already formatted the hard drive and installed the latest version of Slackware. Jonathan Katz also had comments about the situation: "Why didn't he just upgrade to Windows XP? It would have been far more sane and he would have spared all of this trouble." Joey Gannon, always the voice of diametrical viewpoints, said, "This wouldn't have happened if he was an MSDN Universal subscriber! I just bought my fifth copy of Windows Server 2003 the other day. He should have been continuously upgrading with every Microsoft release." Meanwhile, the usually effervescent Nick D merely screamed, "He should have used OS/2! OS/2 Warp I tell you!" In any case, this historic rediscovery of a 16-bit operating system is now behind us and ticalc.org looks forward to many years of 32-bit and 64-bit serving to come.