Here is a facinating piece of Internet history. Of course, in 1978 the Internet did not exist, but its predecesor did— the Arpanet.

"Possibly the first spam ever was a message from a DEC marketing rep to every Arpanet address on the west coast"

Read the story here.

If your computer is really trashed, this info may help...

Restart your computer, and then press F8 during the initial startup to start your computer in Safe Mode with a command prompt.

Log on to your computer with an administrator account or with an account that has administrator credentials.

Type the following command at a command prompt, and then press ENTER:
%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

Most Flash sites make me want to go watch T.V. (not that I ever do). Vidlit.com is super dope. Don't forget to turn on your sound.

I just spent hours backing up a client's computer, reformatting, reinstalling XP, SP2, drivers, software and settings, and restoring their user data. Upon reboot, I was faced with a Blue Screen of Death with the error message: bad_pool_caller.  GRRR!

After some fumbling around, running chkdsk /f and that kind of stuff, I finally ran System Restore from safe mode. Bingo! I'm back in the game.

What happened? Well, I already had Automatic Updates turned on, and XP went ahead and downloaded/ installed a new security patch called: Microsoft GDI+ Detection Tool (KB873374). I'm not sure if this is happening to other people, or if it is somehow specific to this computer's hardware and driver combination. But, I thought that I would put it out there, incase anyone else gets the bad_pool_caller error message after updating. Now you know.

If you are here from a Google search, and this article does pertain to you, please leave a comment to let me know.

Meanwhile, I'm kind of in a dilemma, as I don't want to leave Automatic Updates turned off on this computer, but then I don't want my client to wake up one day to the nasty Blue Screen of Deaaaaaaaaaaath.