Know The Difference Between A Bin And /bin Unless You Want A New Doorstop

Who, Me? The UK has bins, the US prefers trashcans, and computers like their /bin. How do you think today's episode of Who, Me? is going to go?

Our story takes us back to the early 1990s when our reader, Regomized as "Jeremy," was a young PhD student in a biology lab.

"Our supervisor was very fond of technology, and of looking good in the department," he told us, "and one year he found himself with some spare money from a grant."

We'll pause while academics wipe the tea they will have sprayed over their screen at the words "spare money from a grant" before Jeremy continues his story.

"He decided to buy a shiny new computer for our group," he said. Up until then the team made do with sharing a Mac Classic – good for playing Risk and printing PhD theses, but not much else. However, the supervisor was keen to splash some cash.

"The machine he bought was a Silicon Graphics Indy," said Jeremy, "which was a very funky and shiny machine for the time. It was one of the most powerful computers in the entire department and he rode the wave of prestige this brought."

"Funky" is one word for it. While ostensibly a low-end machine in comparison to its bigger Indigo siblings, the Indy had a ludicrous specification when put up against the average PC of the time. The base model featured a mighty 16MB of RAM with hard disk and video options to boggle the mind. It also had a suitably eye-popping price tag.

The version in Jeremy's lab had a colossal 1GB of hard disk storage, which was stuffed full of graphics demos to show off the computers' capabilities. Perhaps a bit too full, considering the real-world work that the lab needed to do.

"One of the postdocs took on the role of sysadmin for this machine," said Jeremy, "but he didn't appear to have much experience with Unix machines."

Hunting around the disk turned up a very bloated directory called '/bin'.

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Bin? The Mac had a bin on the desktop that needed to be emptied. This must be the Indy equivalent, right? Full of stuff that just needed to be cleared. One swift tappity-tap later and /bin was a distant memory.

As was the ability of the very, very expensive box to do anything other than light a baleful power LED. Our postdoc had managed to transform Silicon Graphics' finest into a lump of redundant silicon.

"Cue much hair-pulling and despair," said Jeremy. "It didn't have an optical drive, and there was no easy way to restore all those lost files."

It was the team in the genetics lab that saved the day – they had an array of Indies burning CPU cycles on DNA sequencing. One was liberated and used to get Jeremy's machine up and running once more. Unsurprisingly, the postdoc responsible was swiftly relieved of his administration duties.

As for what became of the resurrected Indy, other than as a means of showing off, there wasn't a lot of use for it, as it turned out. It spent the next two years being used for browsing the web and creating the occasional poster.

Still, as a lesson in knowing difference between a bin and /bin, we'd argue it was invaluable.

Has anyone not accidentally deleted something very important that seemed irrelevant? How did you recover from the black screen of non-bootability? Tell all with an email to Who, Me? ®