Ako kamakailan binili tanghalian para sa aking kapatid na lalaki (gaya ng dati) 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.
Dalawang ng aking mga paboritong mga alaala nauugnay sa aking mabuting kaibigan, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, ngunit mayroon akong sopomor standing" dahil sa ang iba't-ibang mga advanced na mga klase sa placement siya ay kinuha, at iba pa. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, kapag ipinakilala namin siya sa mga tao, 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, mangyari pa, upang i-play mga laro.
Kami ay hindi tulad ng mga computer na walang magawa-inhinyero upang magkano kaya isa sa aming mga paboritong mga bagay-bagay na gawin ay magiging sa telnet sa kahon sila ay sa at magpatakbo ng X-mata 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. Subukang huwag tumawa nang malakas kapag sinusubukan ng isang kaawa-awang engineer na isara ang X-eye pagkatapos ng X-eye at bumubulong-bulong tungkol dito 🙂
We also played X-trek on those boxes. Upang gawin iyon, nagkaroon ka ng upang i-download ang 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, muling itinayo ito at pagkatapos ay nawasak Gabe sa susunod na namin ang naglaro.
Gabe ay din ng isang malaking fan ng isang palabas sa TV na tinatawag na Blake ni 7. I had never seen it, ngunit iyon ay hindi maiwasan ang akin mula sa insisting na Dr. Who is the superior show. Ang mga pagtatalo ay mag-iinit minsan 🙂
Minsan, 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, karapatan" was his answer. I then logged in, ipinasok ang kanyang user id, naka upang harapin sa kanya, nai-type at sinabi nang malakas, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.
Sa susunod na linggo (o sa lalong madaling panahon): More computer room antics from college.
Mayroon ba kayong anumang upang ibahagi? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.
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Paul