Downloading the Internet
A high school teacher saw a student saving work to a floppy disk and banned him from the computers for trying to 'download the internet.' To a 1.44MB floppy disk. Over Dual ISDN.
We were in the computer lab at school, doing our own work. Nothing exciting. The kid sitting next to me needed to save what he’d been working on, so he put a floppy disk in the drive and hit save.
For anyone who’s never seen one, a floppy disk was a small plastic square that held 1.44 megabytes of data. For context, a single photo from your phone today wouldn’t fit on one.
The file started copying. A teacher saw the disk go in and marched over.
“Stop what you’re doing.”
He said he was just saving his work.
“Don’t argue with me. You’re banned from the computers for the rest of the term.”
I jumped in and said he really was just saving his work, I’d watched him do it. She told me he wasn’t saving anything, he was trying to download the internet.
Download the internet.
I said that’s not possible. You can’t download the internet. You especially can’t download it to a floppy disk. The entire school was running on a Dual ISDN connection, you’d struggle to download a single webpage quickly, let alone the entire internet.
She told me to stay out of it or I’d be banned from the computers too.
So I went and found a teacher who actually understood computers and explained what had happened. He listened, nodded, and said “Yeah, that’s wrong. But I can’t go override another teacher.”
And that was that. A kid got banned from the computers for saving a Word document.
I think about this story a lot, actually. Not because it was particularly dramatic, but because I keep seeing the same thing play out everywhere. Someone in a position of authority makes a confident decision about something they don’t understand, and nobody with the knowledge to correct it has the power to do so. The people who know better either get shut down or shrug and say “not my problem.”
It happens in schools, in offices, in boardrooms. Someone bans a tool, blocks a process, or makes a policy, not because they’ve looked into it, but because it looked wrong to them in the moment. And once that call is made, it sticks, because admitting you were wrong feels worse than letting someone else stay wrong.
The kid just wanted to save his homework. Twenty-something years later, I still don’t think she knows what a floppy disk actually does.
