Re: Oh, the joys
On the original Dartmouth time sharing system we implemented a "DIAL" command that allowed TTY to TTY communications. We discovered than no useful work could be done because someone would always "DIAL" you when you were typing in a program intercepting all typing until you pressed "ESC" (or "ALT-MODE"). So we disabled the command - it was a neat piece of code though.
I did once use the command from the master TTY to talk with coeds etc. before a big Dartmouth game (about 1965). Someone asked, "What will be the score of the game?" I quickly typed in some score which turned out to be correct. After the game there was a heated argument in the TTY user room with some claiming the computer could predict the score of football games in advance.
