Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt
- Reference: 1665986294
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/10/17/who_me/
- Source link:
This week we're continuing our recent theme of pranksters making merry fun with the tale of a university researcher who took sweet revenge on a passive-aggressive brown-nosing twerp.
Our hero – for that is what he is – shall be Regomized as "Joshua". In 1987 he was working in the Chemical Engineering department of a university. Thatcher-era budgets being what they were, the department had but one PC for his research project: 640KB RAM, 10MB hard drive and a four-color monitor. On that powerhouse, Joshua wrote code in Fortran 77, then offloaded to a compiler to produce executables.
[1]
Depending on the complexity of the code for any given piece of the project (and allowing for debugging and occasional crashes) it was possible to produce perhaps three executable files per hour. Slow going, in other words.
[2]
[3]
That modest pace sufficed until another team member arrived. Nominally junior to Joshua, this new guy, who we'll call "Toad", had a high opinion of himself and took every opportunity to ingratiate himself to the higher-ups – usually at Joshua's expense. I think we're all familiar with the type.
Joshua and Toad had to share the one PC (see above re: Thatcher-era university budgets) and given the workload this meant that time had to be managed quite carefully. Our man Josh tried to be flexible and accommodating, even coming in on weekends. Toad, on the other hand, somehow managed to be completely and inflexibly committed such that he had to use the computer at the times when Joshua needed it.
[4]
Which would have been annoying enough, but making matters worse was Joshua's suspicion that Toad was playing games when he should have been running code. Remember the era we're talking about here – this is someone's important university research being jerked around by Q-Bert in four colors.
[5]Tetchy trainee turned the lights down low to teach turgid lecturer a lesson
[6]PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver
[7]Bad UI killed the radio star
[8]Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C 8 H 10 N 4 O 2
The matter came to a head when Joshua had a series of important compiles that had to be done by Monday, and Toad knew about it. Joshua planned to work the weekend, but when the roster for time on the PC came out Toad had it booked both days.
On the Friday afternoon, Toad was not in attendance. So before Joshua went home for the evening, he edited the DOS prompt.
Normally, if you recall, the DOS prompt would default to telling the user what directory they're in and inviting them to input a command. Like so: C:\> .
But by a simple expedient, the prompt could be changed to whatever you wanted. In this case, it became: NOT NOW THANKS I DON'T WANT TO PLAY .
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When Toad came in the next day, that was the message that greeted him. He hit return a few times to see if the infernal machine would snap out of it:
NOT NOW THANKS I DON'T WANT TO PLAY
NOT NOW THANKS I DON'T WANT TO PLAY
NOT NOW THANKS I DON'T WANT TO PLAY
NOT NOW THANKS I DON'T WANT TO PLAY
Then, frustrated, he went home – leaving the computer free for Joshua to get some work done.
Of course, on Monday there was hell to pay for this bit of harmless sabotage, and Joshua got a stern talking-to. In response, he pointed out that of course the computer remained fully functional, regardless of what the DOS prompt said. And what's more, if Toad were really the computer whizz he made himself out to be he could have changed it back very easily.
The matter was resolved with lingering discomfort. Which was so totally worth it.
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/03/who_me/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/26/who_me/
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Re: point of order
If he didn't write it in FORTRAN 77 then which language did he write it in?
Fortunately programming languages had moved on from upper case names with years attached by the time I got into the industry.
Pffth!
.. "Pedantry fur Plebeians", if you please...!
Re: point of order
In '87 Microsoft Fortran included the MS Editor. I used WordStar.
Re: point of order
In 1987 I wrote a full screen editor called EasyEdit. Of course, it had all the Wordstar codes in it so it was familiar to all.
By 1990 (when I stopped modifiying it), you could do Edit -> Compile -> Test all from within the confines of EasyEdit.
He could have used that.
Re: point of order
If he was ofloading the code to be compiled on another machine, it probably wasn't MS Fortran.
Re: point of order
Oh, please. Nobody used edlin for much of anything in 1987 ... or the fiveish years prior, for that matter. It was one of the first things that people wrote replacements for on DOS.
MicroEMACS was available from 1985, and a lot of people stuck with writing Fortran on a PC used it. At least around here (Unis and assorted proto-SillyConValley companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, SLAC, LLNL & etc.). By the time of this story, there were at least half a dozen other decent editors for DOS to choose from in the free/shareware BBS archives (or even FTP sites, if you knew how). I used my own full-screen editor that used a subset of the vi keybindings, which I ingeniously called vi.
Trust me, I wrote plenty of code in FORTRN77 on a DOS machine before offloading it to the compiler, usually running on a DEC box of one description or another. Still do, occasionally. Lots of money maintaining the old shit.
Where there's muck there's brass ...
Re: point of order
Would that be "Petty Pedantry"?
Suspected of playing games?
Couldn't he have run the Tree command at C:\ and piped it to a text file then reviewed that to see what executables were present?
Re: Suspected of playing games?
Why bother ... by 1987, almost all DOS machines that were doing serious work had a pirated copy of Norton Commander on them. Failing that, it would have been on a floppy somewhere within easy reach. Took almost no time to manually eyeball a 10 meg hard drive.
Not that I endorse pirating software, mind ... just telling it like it was.
the department had but one PC for his research project: 640KB RAM, 10MB hard drive and a four-color[sic] monitor.
But 640K should be enough for anyone...
But it had rare ”four-color monitor”.
The "640K" quote is often falsely attributed to Bill Gates, implying it was a DOS issue. Actually, it was a hardware issue with the original IBM PC. In all reality, when configured properly (and with an add-in card) MS-DOS running on the original 5150 would happily access around 760K of "low" RAM (if you could afford it!).
The real "should be enough" quote was from Steve Jobs, when demoing the original Apple Macintosh at the Home Brew Computer Club, a couple weeks before the official unveiling. He said "128K should be more than enough for home users" ... and he had a point. We had flight simulators running in 64K of RAM back then.
When I were a lad
We had to type out our F77 programs on punch cards, put them through a card reader and wait a day for result, which was, invariably, a syntax error. I never managed to get a program to successfully compile, let alone run.
Now get off my lawn!
Re: When I were a lad
I'm not quite as ancient :) , it was PASCAL and they'd implemented a data entry system to bypass the punch cards*. Jobs were still submitted to the IBM 370 though and it was 15-30 minutes for you to get your output (or longer if the operators had gone to lunch),
I remember the feeling of dread when you saw a huge great stack of paper in the relevant pigeonhole as that usually meant you'd c****d up badly.
*The previous year had still been punch cards so I narrowly missed them.
Re: When I were a lad
Luxury!
We toggled switches and read Blinkenlights ... and we liked it!
Joshua's suspicion that Toad was playing games
Well, since you must have had to share the space, wouldn't have Josh have seen the screen?? or heard the mad clickety clack of keys by a gamer. I managed two computer labs as one of my first IT roles, I've seen plenty of gamers trying to hide their sins...
Around that time I was a polytechnic student and we had a computer centre consisting of one room of PR1ME terminals and one room of PCs. One evening I went into the PC room to see every chair occupied and a large number of people waiting around for one to become vacant. Clearly some coursework deadlines were approaching fast. Various word processors and IDEs were open on the PCs except for one. Our very own Toad was playing Leisure Suit Larry. I drew his attention to the large number of people needing to work and was told in no uncertain terms where to go. Bored of waiting I decided to leave for a drink at the union bar and try again later. Two other chaps who'd had the same idea followed me out and warned me to be on my guard as Toad was a spoilt little rich kid who'd already attempted to run someone down in his car for calling him out on something or other. No great tale to tell but when I arrived back later he had gone. I like to think that he'd felt some shame after being so publicly made aware of the genuine needs of others.
The one inviolate rule in such shared computer resource spaces is and was "No gaming if people are waiting!".
I would have (and have, and no doubt will again) reached over and turned off the machine.
Spoiled rich kid student and a PRIME? Has to be Oxford Poly.
Arrogant Contractor
This is not anti-contractor, just this one in particular.
He had worked for us for a while and then left to pursue another contract. Which couldn't have worked out as he was back with us doing the same job after a few months. Anyway, after being back for a week or two and when I was on a training course, he sent round an e-mail to the whole team suggesting that we upgrade the backup software (my remit, nothing whatsoever to do with him) as it was somewhat out of date. On my return I wrote a reply, to the whole team, nicely asking him what he would recommend as we were on fully-supported version A.X.X.X-1 and couldn't upgrade to B.X.X.X as version B was 64-bit only and the hardware was 32-bit.
His reply, directly to me, did not even contain an apology, just a "Oh I didn't realise you had upgraded it as it was an older version when I left" response.
That's right, he hadn't even bothered to check version numbers, just sent it anyway to get some brownie points. And the annoying this is that everyone thought he was wonderful at his job; instead, I saw someone who winged it and used Google a lot (this opinion was created before this issue, and reinforced by it and subsequent interactions).
point of order
>> Joshua wrote code in Fortran 77
The honorable author may recall that, on PCs at least, you didn't "...write code in FORTRAN 77 and offload it to a compiler", you wrote FORTRAN 77 code in edlin, saved the file and compiled that code using a FORTRAN 77 compiler from the command line (or batch file).
Sometimes, if you were lucky (for specific values of luck) you had EMACS available, in which case writing code and offloading it to the compiler is sort of right - EMACS could shell and run the compiler for you. In that case I conceed that you could claim to have a FORTRAN IDE....
/mines the one with a copy of 'Pettey Pendantry for Plebians' in the pocket