It’s back in the day when IBM Series/1’s are common, which means it’s also the pre-cellphone era, and this young pilot fish who works for a company that installs such systems in hospitals is on call for any customers needing assistance.
But he has to leave the house for just a few minutes, and when the admissions department of one hospital calls to say that its S/1 has locked up, his wife fields the call.
“Well,” she says, “he usually tells them to just hit the blue button.”
That blue button is located on the CPU panel, and it does indeed kick off an initial program load that will set the S/1 back in order. And “Hit the blue button” is indeed what the admissions staff expected to be told — so they took the wife’s comment as due authorization, and all was well.
