Every technical support person knows that users can ask silly questions, but not all of them know that users have been asking such questions for hundreds of years, as this quote by Charles Babbage (1791–1871), the first person to imagine a programmable computer, shows:
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”