Using the holidays to tidy up my archives, I stumble upon old screenshots of Windows glitches I encountered when I was a student. Yes, the base platform at school was Windows, but it was 10 years ago (if this can constitute a valid excuse to not use Linux). Wait. What? 10 years ago? How time flies!

Anyway. Without further ado, let’s start this moment of pure nostalgia with a 1.74 Gb floppy disk:

Windows file window on the A: floppy drive, its folder names all garbled into rows of identical symbols and the status bar claiming 16 objects totalling 1.74 GB

This one was produced by repeatedly screenshoting the current screen in a Word document. I found it interesting because of the decaying pink color. I think this degradation was the result of cumulative color dithering or any other image compression artifact:

A Word document holding a screenshot of itself over and over, the nested windows spiralling into the centre and washing pinker with every generation

The last ones are not glitches per se but major UI issues. Here automated system upgrades triggered a modal window you weren’t able to close or dismiss, leaving you with no choice but reboot the machine and lose any unsaved work:

Windows 2000 desktop with a Perl script open in an editor, blocked by an automatic-updates dialog demanding a reboot with a greyed-out No button

The same desktop a few minutes later, now with an Internet Explorer crash report stacked on top of the undismissable reboot prompt