Posts by cdr_data

Undebug my heart: Using Cisco's IOS to take down capitalism – accidentally

Re: 'Deliverables'

And you got there by polishing the brass on the big front door?

Also G&S...

George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user

Pranks

I changed the default Windows sound for incoming email to an audio clip from the children's program Blue's Clues. It would sing the little song "We just got a letter! We just got a letter! Wonder who it's from!"

Back in the mid-80s when our manufacturing plant was run by rooms full of Vaxen, we were connected to them via DEC terminal servers, which had it's own prompt and commands. There was a send message command, and it was possible to send the terminal escape sequence to clear the entire screen ($[H$[J). Whatever the user was doing, their screen got blanked.

And further back, while in college, I heard of the April Fools prank some enterprising students played. On the Xerox Sigma-7 that we were running in the computer center, all error messages were contained in a keyed file. When an error occurred, the system looked up the text in the file based on the key and displayed whatever was there. They managed to switch the official error message file with one containing "custom" messages. The center staff was not amused.

Frames per second? Windows Terminal brings back text animation with the VT100 blink

Ah, the days of DEC terminals! Back in the 80s, I worked at a company that had a massively-automated factory with VAXen everywhere. In the office area, the terminals were connected to a terminal server. The terminal server had a user-accessible menu, and one of the options was to send a message from the terminal server to a connected terminal. And, it was more than happy to send DEC escape sequences. All you had to do was look up a user in the list and send them the escape sequence $[H$[J - and their screen would blank.