Я нядаўна купіў абед для майго брата (па-ранейшаму) 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.
Two my favorite memories relate to my good friend, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, but I have Sophomore standing" due to the various advanced placement classes he had taken, і г.д.. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, when we introduced him to people, we’d say "This is Gabe. He’s a Senior, but he has Sophomore standing".
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, вядома, гуляць у гульні.
Нам не падабаліся кампутарныя бездапаможным інжынерам так, адна з нашых любімых рэчаў, каб зрабіць, было б Telnet да скрынкі яны былі і запусціць X-вока 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. Паспрабуйце не смяяцца ўголас, калі няшчасны інжынер спрабуе заплюшчыць X-eye за X-eye і мармыча пра гэта сабе пад нос 🙂
We also played X-trek on those boxes. Для гэтага, you had to download the source, 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, re-built it and then destroyed Gabe the next time we played.
Gabe was also a huge fan of a TV show called Blake’s 7. I had never seen it, but that didn’t prevent me from insisting that Dr. Who is the superior show. Спрэчкі часам нарасталі 🙂
Аднойчы, 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, "I’m going to guess your password right now, Gabe." "Yeah, права" was his answer. I then logged in, entered his user id, turned to face him, typed and said out loud, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.
На наступным тыдні (or soon): More computer room antics from college.
Do you have any to share? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.
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