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[Weaver]

The other day my iPad 5 became suddenly unusable with the virtual pointing device whizzing round the screen clicking on all sorts of random things if you touched the screen anywhere. At first I thought mistakenly that it was just the virtual keyboard, until I went into settings and saw it selecting the wrong items all the time.

I began to panic, thought my iPad had a deathful hardware disease. Then suddenly it came to me. Thirty years ago I had a machine that started running incredibly slowly, and when you fired up a command line, auto repeat didn't work right and the machine started typing garbage itself.

The answer back then was a printer cable with nothing connected to the end of it that was just plugged into the back of it. Removing it cured the problem.

Back to 2015. So too with my poor iPad. A lightning cable was plugged in to charge the machine. Took it out, all good. Binned the evil genuine Apple cable quick.

[AArdvark]

I have seen a similar problem with a Centronics cable on some early IBM clones (gives the age away  ) where the PC would not boot until the cable was connected to a printer or removed.
Thought that unterminated cables was a problem from the past !!

Goes to show that old problems are being recreated by yet another generation that fails to learn from what has passed before 
Every generation thinks that they know it all and the last generation were idiots 

Very surprised that it was an apple cable, I thought they were engineered to always work, virtually even through a EM Pulse <jk> (At least they charge you as though they would  )
 

[Weaver]

@Aardvark Thirty years ago, your story was the same as mine exactly, either a Dell 286 machine or an IBM PC AT (the real thing) can't remember which. Thanks for that!

This Apple cable was not unterminated btw. It was plugged into something supposedly. I assume it had just gone bad somehow, perhaps physical damage.

[AArdvark]

Probably the same brand of machine
I cannot remember now ..... used many brands which are no more.
Worked for a company called P&P (also no more) and saw lots of kit which changed every 3 months.

Sent from my SM-P900 using Tapatalk

[Ronski]

Did you try plugging the cable back in? It may have just have got confused some how.

I've seen similar on Windows, where it appears locked up but seems to store up all the key presses then suddenly decides to start processing them all and then all multitude of things happen.

[Weaver]

@ronski - this nightmare went on for a couple of hours. I rebooted the machine, and so on. I can't remember whether I pulled out the cable or not, unfortunately.