"The thin clients were an anachronism, but not a problem unless the system image on their internal storage became corrupt. This happened often enough that Hannah's employer kept a few spare thin clients handy. Once that cache of kit ran low, the company would send dead devices to an external service provider who reimaged them for £600 apiece and took six weeks to do the job."
""I figured out how to boot the units from floppy to DOS, and reflash the units over a serial interface," she wrote. "But there was one problem: flashing the thin clients took around three hours, and after two hours the software would prompt for a keypress or the process would fail." If someone pressed that key, the thin client would emerge with a fresh and functional system image."
A workplace in the early 2000s used thin clients for some Windows NT workloads alongside mostly PC-based systems. Thin-client system images frequently corrupted, so the employer stocked spares and outsourced reimaging at £600 per unit with a six-week turnaround. A young technician attempted an in-house fix, learning to boot from floppy to DOS and reflash units over a serial interface. The flashing process took about three hours and required a keypress after two hours or it would fail. The technician informed the boss but omitted that presence was unnecessary for the final keypress. Her boss did some mental arithmetic.
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