Cheannaigh mé le déanaí lón do mo dheartháir (mar is gnách) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges. At my alma mater, Lafayette Coláiste, 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.
Baineann dhá mo chuid cuimhní cinn is fearr leat le mo chara maith, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, ach tá mé seasamh Sophomore" mar gheall ar na ranganna socrúcháin chun cinn éagsúla a bhí déanta aige, etc. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, nuair a tugadh isteach againn air le daoine, 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, ar ndóigh, a imirt cluichí.
Ní raibh muid cosúil leis an innealtóirí ríomhaire-helpless chun an méid sin a bheadh ar cheann de na ár n-rudaí is fearr leat a dhéanamh a telnet chun an bosca a bhí siad ar agus a reáchtáil X-eye 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. Chun é sin a dhéanamh, bhí tú a íoslódáil an fhoinse, 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, ath-tógadh é agus ansin a scrios Gabe an chéad uair eile a bhí againn.
Bhí Gabe chomh maith le lucht leanúna mór de seó teilifíse ar a dtugtar Blake 7. I had never seen it, ach ní raibh cosc a chur orm ó insisting go Dr. Who is the superior show. The arguments would get heated at times 🙂
Lá amháin, 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, ceart" was his answer. I then logged in, iontráil a id úsáideora, iompú chun aghaidh a thabhairt dó, clóscríofa agus dúirt sé amach os ard, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.
Tseachtain seo chugainn (nó go luath): More computer room antics from college.
An bhfuil aon a roinnt? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.
</deireadh>
Paul