Mimi hivi karibuni kununuliwa chakula cha mchana kwa ndugu yangu (kama kawaida) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges. At my alma mater, Lafayette Chuo, 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, nk. 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, bila shaka, kucheza michezo.
Sisi si kama wahandisi kompyuta-wanyonge na hivyo kiasi moja ya mambo yetu favorite kwa kufanya itakuwa telnet kwa sanduku wao walikuwa juu na kukimbia X-jicho 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. Jaribu kutocheka kwa sauti kubwa wakati mhandisi asiye na shida anajaribu kufunga X-jicho baada ya X-jicho na kunung'unika chini ya pumzi yake juu yake 🙂
We also played X-trek on those boxes. To do that, 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. Mabishano yanaweza kuwa moto wakati mwingine 🙂
One day, 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, haki" was his answer. I then logged in, aliingia mtumiaji wake id, akageuka kwa uso yake, typed na kusema kwa sauti kubwa, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.
Wiki ijayo (au hivi karibuni): More computer room antics from college.
Je una lolote kushiriki? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.
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Paulo