This is just plain weird

[Stacy Pober]

The page: http://www.manhattan.edu/library/palsgate.html
is the home page for our public computers.  Today, helping a patron, I
noticed that the home page on one of our public computers seemed to be
an old (November99) version of this page.  I checked that Netscape was
set with the right URL for the home page.  I tried going to the library
home page and clicking on the link for this page in case I was missing a
very subtle typographical error, but no, I still got this old version of
the page.  

I browsed to another site so that the page in question was not on screen
and cleared the Netscape disk and memory caches.  Still, when I hit
Home, I was looking at the old page. 

At this point, I thought something had gone wrong on the web server end
of things.  I don't personally load these pages, and wondered if perhaps
the current version of this page had gotten munged and the college
webmistress had put up the older version as a backup. 

But I went into my office and using the Internet both from the campus
network or through my dialup ISP connection,  I can see the updated
version of the page with the correct "Last modified" date (21 January
2000).  

Netscape prefs are set to "Document on cache is compared to document on
network Once per session."  

Where are the public computers getting this old version of the file? 
Why are they persisting in displaying this version rather than the newer
version?

I knew this day would come.  The computers are trying to "gaslight" me. 

-- 
Stacy Pober, Information Alchemist
Manhattan College Libraries
spober at manhattan.edu
http://www.manhattan.edu/library/