Jim Wilkins wrote:

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote
Jim Wilkins wrote:
The good one (not completely my idea) was based on an analog noise level
sensor that detected people approaching and flashed REPENT! THE END IS
NEAR!


You could have alternated that with things like 'Duck and cover!'
'Head for the hills!' 'Judgment day is nigh, sinner!' or even something
completely silly like 'Eat at Joe's!'

The nastiest thing I put on screen was nothing; a thousand(?) form feeds
instant messaged to people tying up the VAX with "Empire". Their VT100
screen stayed blank for about ten minutes as the form feeds scrolled
through. They had changed the name of the program to hide it but not the
size. In extreme cases I ran a calculation of pi by Leibniz' tedious formula
until everyone gave up.

I don't know if he invented the ideas, but one programmer there wrote The
Grinch That Eats Programs in which a PacMan sprite wandered around your
screen leaving a trail of blank spaces, and a Tired Monitor routine that
made characters slide to the bottom of your screen. This was in the early
1980's.


I was working with oddball systems back then. Like a pair of MC6800
based Metrodata computers with six NTSC video channels, each. One had
32K of RAM, while the other had 48K, and a pair of 8" floppy drives to
store the CATV system's program guide. That was made by SMS (Scientific
Memory Systems), and failed quite often. The boss was a cheap SOB who
refused to replace floppies till they died. That destroyed the heads in
the Shugart 801 drives on a regular basis. Once, we lost both disks at
the same time. There was no operating system on the disks, but the
configuration for all six channels were lost. I had to go through eight
full boxes of failed floppies to find one line here and there to
reconstruct the files. I also learned a lot of hidden and illegal
commands in the process. Like how to open the AP newswire and post
messages on what was supposed to be a RO function. I resisted the
temptation, but it wasn't easy.

I made him buy two boxes of new floppies, and copied the
configuration file to every disk, and made damn sure no disk was used
more than a month, until I quit that company. Those 801 drives were
configured to run constantly, so the media wore out a lot faster than it
should have.

The last I heard, they scrapped the two systems and replaced them
with 12 Commodore 64s and a floppy drive. The company owned EPG
(Electronic Program Guide), so corporate made them switch when the
Metrodata systems died one last time. I wish they had replaced them
while I was there. It was no fun repairing circuit boards with no
schematics, from a company that was out of business.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.