ನಾನು ಇತ್ತೀಚೆಗೆ ನನ್ನ ಸಹೋದರನನ್ನು ಊಟದ ಖರೀದಿಸಿತು (ಎಂದಿನಂತೆ) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges. At my alma mater, LAFAYETTE ಕಾಲೇಜ್, 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.

ಎರಡು ನನ್ನ ಮೆಚ್ಚಿನ ನೆನಪುಗಳು ನನ್ನ ಉತ್ತಮ ಸ್ನೇಹಿತ ಸಂಬಂಧಿಸಿವೆ, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, ಆದರೆ ನಾನು ಸೊಫೊಮೊರ್ ನಿಂತಿರುವ ಹೊಂದಿವೆ" ಅವರು ತೆಗೆದುಕೊಂಡ ಹಲವಾರು ಮುಂದುವರಿದ ಉದ್ಯೋಗ ತರಗತಿಗಳು ಕಾರಣ, ಇತ್ಯಾದಿ. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, ನಾವು ಜನರು ಅವನನ್ನು ಪರಿಚಯಿಸಿದಾಗ, 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, ಸಹಜವಾಗಿ, ಆಟಗಳನ್ನು ಆಡಲು.

ನಾವು ಕಂಪ್ಯೂಟರ್ ಅಸಹಾಯಕ ಎಂಜಿನಿಯರ್ಗಳು ಇಷ್ಟವಾಗುತ್ತಿರಲಿಲ್ಲ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹಾಗೆ ನಮ್ಮ ನೆಚ್ಚಿನ ವಸ್ತುಗಳ ಒಂದು ತಾವು ಯಾವುದೇ ಪೆಟ್ಟಿಗೆಗೆ ನೆಟ್ ಗೆ ಮತ್ತು ಓಡುತ್ತವೆ ಎಕ್ಸ್ ಕಣ್ಣು 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, ನೀವು ಮೂಲ ಡೌನ್ಲೋಡ್ ಬಂತು, 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, ಪುನಃರೂಪಿಸಲಾಯಿತು ಇದು ತದನಂತರ ಗೇಬ್ ನಾವು ಆಡಿದ ಮುಂದಿನ ಬಾರಿ ನಾಶ.

ಗೇಬ್ ಸಹ ಎಂಬ TV ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮವೊಂದರಲ್ಲಿ ದೊಡ್ಡ ಅಭಿಮಾನಿಯಾಗಿದ್ದರು ಬ್ಲೇಕ್ನ 7. I had never seen it, ಆದರೆ ಆ ಡಾ ಒತ್ತಾಯಿಸಿ ನನ್ನ ಅಡ್ಡಿಯಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲ. Who is the superior show. The arguments would get heated at times 🙂

ಒಂದು ದಿನ, 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, ಬಲ" was his answer. I then logged in, ತನ್ನ ಬಳಕೆದಾರ ಐಡಿ ನಮೂದಿಸಿದ, ಅವನನ್ನು ಎದುರಿಸಲು ತಿರುಗಿ, ಟೈಪ್ ಮತ್ತು ಜೋರಾಗಿ ಹೇಳಿದರು, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.

ಮುಂದಿನ ವಾರ (ಅಥವಾ ಶೀಘ್ರದಲ್ಲೇ): More computer room antics from college.

ನೀವು ಯಾವುದೇ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಹೊಂದಿದ್ದೀರಾ? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.

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ನನ್ನ ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ಚಂದಾದಾರರಾಗಿ.