Cast your mind back to 1995 when Windows 95 became a thing. This is set in late 95 or early 96 when new computers came exclusively with Win 95.

I had a customer who had an existing system for inventory, POS and accounting. It was a DOS based system and was written in Visual Basic. Not Studio or .net. Just visual Basic.

So customer wanted to upgrade computer and existing system to latest version. I was not a reseller for the system, but they agreed to sell a new version to me. I asked them if it worked under Win 95. They assured me 100% it worked.

I assumed they had tested it under Win 95 after such a definitive statement. I was wrong they lied.

First problem was they wanted customers details before they sold it to me. I was suspicious, so i gave them his name and my fax and phone number.

So then first problem was all the data didn't transfer correctly. I rang them and they asked for a copy of the system. They stated that Windows backup onto floppy discs would be sufficient. So backup was done and airbag to remote city.

Clue 1:

A day after they received it I received a fax addressed to customer with page after page of error messages and a suggestion that customer contact their Authorised Dealer locally. I rang them and asked politely what restore version they used. They said DOS 6.2.

We all know why they got errors don't we? Versions of backup and restore were not compatible between versions of DOS. I asked less politely why they were attempting to throw me under the bus when the mistake was theirs alone. The answer was not really satisfying. We resolved the restore problem and then they sent a new version of the transfer program which did transfer correctly.

Then the customer attempted to do the end of month on the new system. He sold things and at the end of every month he ran a summary report of everything he had ever stocked with on hand and sales per month columns. He then looked at it on the screen. On his old system it worked fine. On his new system it gave "Out of memory" errors before it finished the report. It did this even when I quit Win 95 and the underlying DOS system showed 640K free.

Clue 2:

I contacted the supplier of this program and the help person told me I had to run memmaker on the system to allow enough RAM for the report to run. Evidently every report ran in memory and had no spooling capability. I advised them that this was a brand new Win 95 system and as such did not have an autoexec.bat or config.sys. It also did not use (or need) memmaker.

The help person told me "Trust me, you just need to run memmaker" I asked them if they had run this program on Win 95 and it turned out that they had not. In fact they had a copy of Win 95, but had not installed it. They had plans to install it on one of their own computers at home. As well they had no access to the developers who existed in another country. They had no idea how to fix it or even to go about finding anything to do.

I realised I had been lied to by lying liars who lie. (pants on fire). I had anger issues in those days, especially when people lied to me. I gave them a roasting for being idiots. Unfortunately I did this in the customer's shop and I'm sure he heard me call them liars (and worse).

I told him that there was no way for me to make his system work for his report without some limit being placed on the number of items selected. In perfect hindsight perhaps some limit on vcache in system.ini may have helped, but I had no knowledge of this. In those days there was not the plethora of websites available with all the knowledge anyone could want.

I was never invited back to his shop, and I found out later that the local Authorised Dealer for that program took over that customer. I have no knowledge if they ever fixed that (unpolished) piece of .... I decided I wanted nothing more to do with them.

In hindsight perhaps I could have questioned them more about their blanket statement that it 100% ran on Win 95. Perhaps I could have been more tactful when talking to them on the phone. Part of the problem was that the customer was an hours drive from me (and an hour back) and that the main supplier of this program was 2000 Kms away from both of us. I was calling them on my mobile phone which cost me lots of money in those days and I had other customers who needed me more.