Ek het onlangs gekoop het middagete vir my broer (soos gewoonlik) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges. At my alma mater, Lafayette College, the academic support IT department had a very inclusive way about it. We were given a LOT of rope and I took advantage of that at times.
Twee my gunsteling herinneringe aan my goeie vriend, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, maar ek het stage staan" as gevolg van die verskillende gevorderde plasing klasse wat hy geneem het, ens.. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, wanneer ons hom aan mense, we’d say "This is Gabe. He’s a Senior, Maar hy het 'n stage staan ".
The college had some Sun workstation/servers running X-Window. They had gigantic monitors and the engineers used them for CAD and other boring engineer stuff. We CS people used them to learn programming and, natuurlik, speletjies te speel.
Ons het nie soos die rekenaar-hulpeloos ingenieurs te veel so een van ons gunsteling dinge om te doen sou wees die telnet aan die boks hulle op en loop X-oog on them. This would pop up a pair of eyes that followed the mouse around on the screen. You could pop up even more and have literally a dozen or more of the X-eye applications running. Try not to laugh out loud when a hapless engineer is trying to close X-eye after X-eye and muttering under his breath about it 🙂
We also played X-trek on those boxes. To do that, jy het om die bron te laai, get various dependencies wherever you could find them and build it. I wasn’t a sophisticated C programmer, but I could read header files. I was looking through these and found directives like "#DEFINE MAX_TORPEDO_DISTANCE 10". I played around with that increase range and power for phases and torpedoes, weer gebou en dan vernietig Gabe die volgende keer wat ons gespeel.
Gabe was ook 'n groot fan van 'n TV-show met die naam Blake se 7. I had never seen it, maar dit het nie verhoed dat my uit te dring dat dr.. Who is the superior show. The arguments would get heated at times 🙂
Een dag, it occurred to me that I could probably guess his UNIX password. I sat down next to him one day and announced in a loud tone, "Ek gaan nou om jou wagwoord te raai, Gabe." "Yeah, reg" was his answer. I then logged in, betree sy gebruikers id, draai na hom, getik en hardop gesê, "Ek wonder of dit die B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.
Volgende week (of so spoedig moontlik): More computer room antics from college.
Het jy 'n deel? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.
</einde>
Paul