Terminal trickery, or how to improve a novel immeasurably
- Reference: 1620027014
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/03/who_me/
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Our tale comes from a reader we shall call "Anne", because that is not her name but she understably wants to remain anonymous.
Anne was gainfully employed as a contractor for an automotive accessory manufacturer and worked on the testing of some critical embedded software and hardware that would later be found in the wares of a number of major car makers.
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As was the tradition of the time, the supposedly filthy rich contractors were kept well apart from the hardworking permies (lest those workers be lured to the dark side, we suspect. This was the early 1990s after all.)
In this case, Anne's team had been stashed into a portacabin set up in the car park. They were tasked with creating a mountain of test paperwork so vast that that even if something in the embedded code did go wrong, so much testing had been done that it was clearly impossible for it to have been foreseen.
The other thing they did was… get bored.
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"Obviously," Anne told us, "cooping up a bunch of highly skilled software engineers together, working on such a mundane and repetitive task was asking for trouble."
Indeed it was. Soon tiring of the "Daily Word Game", in which a random word from an electronic thesaurus would be snuck into the documentation of the day (the winner was the one to use it the most times), the restless team turned their attention to what fun could be had with the VT220 terminals they were using.
The answer was quite a bit.
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The Unix box running the show was located in the main building, and a hosepipe of Ethernet (occasionally hitting the giddy speeds of 10Mbps) was used to connect the screens via serial taps. "It was possible to cat any characters or character sequences to any other terminal, including special characters like inverse video and BELL," explained Anne.
"Although the terminal display might appear corrupted the working data was unaffected."
It started innocently enough. The contractors would invert the video or ring the bell on each other's screens, doubtlessly helping pass the time until booze o'clock rolled around.
"But then," Anne told us, "we realised that some of the Portacabin windows overlooked the hardware lab windows."
And so, of course, they worked out which terminals were visible and began doing similar things to the staff in the lab. "Sequences of multiple inverse, non inverse and bell characters would create quite a stunning result," said Anne happily.
The users – probably a little less happy. The IT Manager would be called but, just as he arrived, the terminals would be set back to normal. Then, just as he tried to leave, things would go 'wrong' once more. All it lacked was the Benny Hill soundtrack.
It escalated further. Since the contractors were allowed to do as many hours as they liked ("the customer really wanted this product in production," explained Anne) they frequently worked late. One evening, the team noticed a solitary worker still in the lab. They pulled up the text from the worker's screen and found he was writing a novel in the style of famous UK romantic story publisher, Mills & Boon.
There was only one thing for it. One of the contractors found a Jive translator and so did the obvious thing.
The worker found his carefully crafted words suddenly changed to something that might have been heard around Harlem decades previously. Timing was key – the text was changed just long enough to cause confusion, but switched back before the worker starting making changes of his own. Do no harm and all that.
"Goodness knows what he thought," said Anne.
All good things must come to an end, and when the IT Manager decided to replace one of the TTYs in the lab, the team decided to out itself. Of course, the trick with the inverse video and so forth was repeated on the new screen but, "just when he got to the door and turned to rush back, we made sure he saw us all waving from the Portacabin windows!"
"He was surprisingly good natured about it."
There is a saying about idle hands, but we're pretty sure it didn't involve VT220 terminals. What harmless shenanigans have you indulged in to pass the hours away? Or were you the victim of the antics of a contractor hidden out of sight and out of mind? Let us know, with an email to [7]Who, Me? ®
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Re: Novel interference
It's not unique to novels. Even here typing gets corrupted between clicking Submit and its reappearing in larger font as a posted comment.
For anything longer it's advisable to take a newly cooked bit of prose and leave it to rest as they say on the cookery programmes.
Re: Novel interference
" ... take a newly cooked bit of prose and leave it to rest ...
Indeed. It is also surprising how much corruption happens to a "perfect" report left overnight to cool.
"Where did the second copy of paragraph xyz come from and WTF is that chart?"
Re: Novel interference
And Muphry's Law comes into force when you try to correct the trypos and introduce mor!
Re: Novel interference
Maybe there is an equivalent of [1]https://xkcd.com/323/ for writing novels? It could solve your mess when you find your peak.
[1] https://xkcd.com/323/
Black magic
Back at university in the 1980s with VT220s connected to VAXen for pretty much all computing purposes, one of our classmates discovered he could abuse the chat facility to freeze other users' screens. Some people thought it was a kind of black magic, though most of us just thought he was an annoying twit (and then asked for the secret formula).
He also invented a script he called "JIF", which could be used to delete your historic files in order to claim back a small amount of room in your minuscule quota. VMS automatically kept (IIRC) up to 10 older versions of your files, making a new copy each time you saved. While very useful in some circumstances, this quickly ate up large amounts of disc quota as effectively each file was ten times bigger than you thought it was. JIF was a much more useful utility, and did quite a lot to demystify VMS for those of us who had only recently graduated from 8-bit machines at home.
M.
Re: Black magic
At our university it was VT220s to an old Prime mainframe. We explored just about every control sequence for mischievous purposes, including ending the victims session by ending with a stty 0 > /dev/ttyXX
Re: Black magic
VMS's DCL command line had a built-in utility to remove older versions of files: PURGE/KEEP=n, where n was the number of previous versions you wanted to retain. If I recall correctly, that is: it was a looong time ago!
Re: Black magic
I don't remember exactly how it worked (I might even have a printout on fanfold in the attic somewhere) and I dare say PURGE was involved (haven't used VMS since leaving university so it's all been shifted to long-term storage, which is gradually bit-rotting out of existence), but for some reason the utility this bloke wrote was significantly more usable than the way we had previously been doing it, and many of us crafted our own versions which dealt with the particular mix of files we individually created.
M.
I'm a word wrangler...
I started writing stories in middle school (6th to 9th years for you mainky gits) and would amuse myself by writing fantasies about dungeons, dragons, dwarves, elves, hobbits, trolls, etc. I'd create fictional worlds, populate them with said fictional(?) races, and weave intricate tapestries of silliness that would have made any punster proud. This was my hobby and practiced constantly, so when a teacher would assign a writing project on a topic, they invariably had to tell me "Please keep it under a half dozen pages?"
Before such requests became the norm rather than the exception, I could turn a "two page report on $topic" into something a paid-by-the-word author might submit in an attempt to get filthy stinking rich. Worse was if it was on a topic about which I was fond, because then I might wax poeticly for page after page after page. Every little dust mote of minutia, every little tidbit of esoteric trivia, every bit of verbal vomit I could regurgitate all over the page. And since I was typing it all up on my computer (Commodore 64 using PaperClip) I could copy & paste, reorder, splice, tweak, & torture it all until it felt right before hitting print and ripping a copy off the dot matrix printer.
I'd hand over a "rough draft" of ~50 pages of single spaced, 12 point type with 1 inch (~2cm) margins before most of the other students had even figured out WTF to write about in the first place. When the teacher would comment on the fact that I had typed my rough draft, I'd smile, shrug, & explain "I think better that way."
So one day my English teacher gives out our final projects which are to be major discertations on weighty topics requiring much research, editing, revisioning, and _WORK_ to make sure we can't just "spit something out the night before & call it a day". (Restrains the smirk) The topic she hands me is not only one of which I'm fond, it's one near & dear to my heart: the history of heavier than air flight. When I saw my topic I probably squealed like a school girl with a valentine from her favorite crush.
My *first draft* hit nearly 500 pages. I had to cut it back so far that I was afraid it would die from constant consenent dehydration. The "rough draft" I handed in was still over 100 pages long. My teacher had an absolute, utter, unabashed, unmitigated, complete & total shit fit. She said something about assigning a discertation "not a damned epic novel!" To which I said I'd be back after lunch that day. (The school had an open campus, I lived a short bike ride away, so the trip took less time than it took for most students to even make it through the lunch line in the cafeteria.) I come back & drop the *unedited* 500 pager on her desk. "That, Mrs. Evans, is what it was _before_ I neutered it. If you want ''epic'' I'll go back to this one (taps the mountain of papers) and keep going until the project is due in six months."
I do believe she would have spit out her non-false-teeth had she been able to.
We both agreed I'd NOT use the unedited version, go back to the revised one instead, and would kindly refrain from "going through any major dissiduous forest tracts" with future submissions. (Chortle)
Later on I realized that I can write for fun, I can sometimes write for love, but I can't write for profit to save my life. The moment I have to submit something to some blinkering moron whom turns my story into an ocean of red ink, scribbled changes that make no sense, or otherwise destroys what I've written, I get so depressed that I want to go on a moron-murdering-mega-mnemonic-matriculating-masterful-merry-go-round. (Sighs)
I could create entire worlds for D&D adventures with/for my son & friends, I even started drawing the fantasy maps to go along with such realms, but I couldn't stomach crushing my creations into published pulp phiction... (Sorry)
Besides, it's also why I'm posting anonimously: if I stay hidden behind the curtain, I can keep pulling levers, twisting knobs, grinding gears, churning & burning & barfing up idiotic posts like this one in the secure knowledge that you won't drag me outside to stick my head in a poor porcine posterior. (Runs away)
For us it started one day when the HP1000 disk crashed again. The HP service engineers were based in a city two hours away from us, so one of us used the front panel switches to enter a little program that flashed the blinkenlights in a seeming random pattern. We were rewarded with a suitably shocked SE when he eventually arrived: "it's gone tilt", he said.
During the scheduled preventative maintenance sessions, one of the steps was to set a RAM test running, after which the SE work go and check out wiring in the back of the cabinets. At this point my colleague tricky Trev would flip a switch on the front panel that sets the RAM test into continuous mode, so it would wrap around...
One of the things that wasn't mentioned in the HP1000 article the other day is that RTE6 had a 5-letter executable name length - hence the eternal quest for punchy mnemonics - which in our case led to the creation of programs named "ME" and "METOO". And yes, sending stuff to each others' terminals was quite common - baud rate changes being a particular inducement to rage.
Perhaps our grandest stunt was the disk pack swap. Our grand HP1000 computer room had an incubus in the form of a little commercial HP3000 system, which one day was deemed worthy of a real disk drive - one of HP's 400MB "washing machines" (so named because the powerful linear motors would rock the whole drive"). This was delivered in a crate, with the disk pack in a separate box. Everyone waited for the day when the service engineer would arrive to commission the drive - especially tricky Trev & I who had quietly replaced the 400MB pack with an incompatible one from the HP1000 system!
I really should have dug deeper into them...
Pretty sure it was a VT220 system the Halfords I used to work at had (as a spry 18 year old on the parts counter because I could actually identify and find whatever lump of junk a customer brought in to get a replacement for).
I never really could be bothered with trying to break it since this was in the early 2000's and it was already creaking badly as it was. That and I could have run that store after learning every different department's job roles.
Novel interference
You don't need an outside agency to mess with the words you have written; I have been writing a couple of novels for years, every time I open one up and re-read it before adding more, I find a lot of rubbish that I can't possibly have written.