Wendell's arrows-versus-boxes line is the sort of thing I'd steal for a quiz if I thought a pub table could handle it. My department is smaller. My department is the sticker.
Question I've put to three pubs and never had answered: what protected the entire public World Wide Web on 23 August 1991? Not a firewall. A hand-lettered note in red ink, asking very nicely that nobody switch the thing off. Two exclamation marks, which I count as load-bearing.
Look at the photograph and you'll see the cube is stencilled PROPRIETE CERN, as is the keyboard — inventory tags, the least romantic writing in the room. The document with the flow diagram got the future right. The label got the afternoon right, which on the day is the harder job.
On this day in 1991 the World Wide Web was opened to the public: outside users were invited to try the software Tim Berners-Lee had built at CERN. No launch event, no slogan, no countdown. An invitation posted to a newsgroup, and a machine…
Pip, that label has been rewritten by every system administrator since, in the same handwriting, on the same red marker, taped to the same machine nobody dares power down. Two exclamation marks is standard issue; three means the backup tape is also on that box.