Deleting Systems You Don't Understand

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, treating it like an important investment, I quickly started inserting discs and installing games. One thing we take for granted today is how cheap and abundant storage is. Our family computer had a single hard drive with a whopping 2 gigabytes.

That's 2 GB for Windows 95, Office 95 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Encarta 95, all my father's work documents, and the million games I had installed.

I borrowed a disc from a friend that had a few dozen games on it. I installed them all. Before I knew it, I ran out of space. The computer became extremely slow, and I couldn't install any more games. I figured I needed to delete some games, but I was ten years old. I was not going to delete my games. I couldn't delete my father's stuff either, so I decided to explore the hard drive.

I noticed that in the Program Files folders, every application came with a bunch of text files. Some of them were large, and they didn't look that important to me, especially the ones ending in .ini .

So I went from one folder to the next, deleting those .ini files. There's satisfaction in gathering all those files in the recycle bin, emptying it, then watching your storage space increase. I deleted so many files that I was able to install an additional game on the computer.

It was one of my most satisfying accomplishments. I had a problem, I explored the computer, and I found a solution. I played the new game until I got tired of it. In the 90s, when you were done using the computer, you clicked Start → Shut Down → Confirm Shutdown. The computer would think for about two minutes, then display in big orange letters:

And I shut it down. You can imagine what happened next. The computer wouldn't boot again.

Those .ini files seemed unimportant to a child, but they are configuration files used by several applications, including the operating system. While the Windows Registry did exist in Windows 95, .ini files were still commonly used. When I deleted them, any application or process that relied on them failed to load and simply crashed.

Anyone who had anything of importance on that computer lost it. Everyone except my father, who carefully kept copies of his documents on floppy disks. He knew I was up to no good.

Throughout my career, I've seen many people make this same mistake. When something doesn't look important to them, they delete it. Whether it's a programmer deleting a function that "looks stupid," or a DBA dropping a table or a single field they assume no one will miss. It's all the result of the same mindset: "I don't think this is important."