The Original Retractable 'Feature': The PC Cup Holder

Description

A nostalgic tech meme showing a close-up of an old, beige desktop PC tower. Several optical drive trays - for DVDs and CDs from brands like Sony and Plextor - are ejected from the drive bays. The image is captioned at the top with the text: 'Remember when computers had slide-out cup holders?'. This is a classic joke from the era of physical media, referencing the urban legend of novice users mistaking the fragile CD/DVD-ROM tray for a beverage holder. For experienced tech professionals, it's a humorous throwback to the hardware and user misconceptions of the late 1990s and early 2000s, highlighting the evolution of both technology and general computer literacy

Common Tags

RetroComputing LegacyHardware Hardware TechNostalgia TechHumor

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick This was our first attempt at liquid cooling. It wasn't very efficient, and the IO was notoriously sticky

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

This was our first attempt at liquid cooling. It wasn't very efficient, and the IO was notoriously sticky
Anonymous

Our first-tier storage once held 700 MB per platter - and an occasional latte during overnight builds
Anonymous

The real tragedy isn't that users thought these were cup holders - it's that we convinced ourselves we needed five different optical drives for that one time we'd burn multiple discs simultaneously while ripping a CD and watching a DVD... which happened exactly never
Anonymous

Back when 'eject' was a physical button and not just a command, and the most common hardware failure was liquid damage from users who took 'cup holder' documentation a bit too literally. Those were the days when your computer had more drive bays than your modern server rack has actual drives, and tech support tickets included 'beverage extraction from optical media bay' as a legitimate category
Anonymous

The original API misuse: mapping cupholder.open() to opticalDrive.eject(); a surprise reboot called it in prod and we learned about backward-incompatible interfaces via a cappuccino cascading failure
Anonymous

Pre-S3 object storage: 700MB capacity, infinite spill tolerance, eject on demand - no versioning nightmares
Anonymous

Pre-cloud artifact management: burn ISO at 48x, deploy to prod, and rest your coffee on /dev/sr0 - right until auto-close taught us MTLL (mean time to latte loss)
@Diotost 1y

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Sure Not 1y

Vibe
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Also vibe
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Sure Not 1y

https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/