Reply #123: This story does & doesn't check out. The real issue... [View All]

[EuroObserver]

>>mackdaddy (32 posts) Wed Dec-15-04 11:08 PM: I have personally seen this machine in the BOE office, and it is very old, probably a 1990 vintage or so. Motherboards of this vintage usually had the coin type mercury or lithium batteries to keep the CMOS setups. Some had a plug in Ni Cad pack but not many by this time.<<

This is a Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows-for-Workgroups era PC. 16-bit operating systems but plenty for running a simple database system programmed using something like Visual FoxPro, which was at that time, along with Borland's equivalent, considered to be superior to microsoft´s offering (Microsoft's SDK, Visual Studio and monopoly stranglehold soon killed the opposition, of course).

This machine could also have been upgraded to run Windows 95 which was released end 94 if I remember right. So no problem for running tabulation or whatever software with a reasonably up-to-date Windows interface.

As for the observed "commands" at bottom left of screen, as described these could be either/ messages from the BIOS and/or DOS command lines - boot sequence and/or BATCH commands and/or DOS command session with the technician, scrolling up the screen.

Machines of that era that lost BIOS configuration because of battery-power loss to CMOS (the batteries were rechargeable, but not indefinitely; they eventually go flat) would usually, after displaying a few lines at screen bottom-left (but more usually top-left?), go automatically into BIOS configuration mode, displaying a whole screenfull of options and commands for configuring everything from date and time thru hard drives to motherboard type and configuration, all set to default.

So, basically that part of the technician's story could be taken as credible. Which is not to say (there is no way to know) that he didn't in fact do something else. The talk of a 'patch' and a 'fix' seem to imply that something more was done.

Where the story just doesn't, cannot, work is in claiming that 'information' or data has been lost. Unless indeed he is referring to something that's just been erased.

But, in any case, surely the particular issue here is that no technicians (and nobody else either) should have been going anywhere near these machines or their software or the voting records without everything being properly authorised and witnessed and documented.