Travels of the Mind
A discussion somewhere has taken me back to a long gone era. Since all holes were fixed and sunlight could not get in, my mind kept wandering to a time not known or forgotten by many I should say, alas. To the Golden Age of the BBS’s, the bulletin board systems, so to speak. They all of a sudden flourished all around the world but especially in USA and Europe. Run by enthusiasts in their homes, usually with custom equipment and a modem, they could barely handle more than eight people online simultaneously, and mind you, eight was a good number.
Some of them reached to such a fame and recognition that they had followers calling internationally. And those international calls, being expensive at the time, created, well, the sublime art of phreaking. Those phone charges had to be avoided. Most being teenagers, many did not have the luxury of paying for them.
Apart from those touchy issues above, they created a literature of their own, a unique culture. With their text files, the ASCII art, they were the pioneers of blogging.
I remembered a text-file named “Fun with Unix”. Originally written and uploaded to alt.folklore.computers by Charlie Gibb on 29 Apr 1991, this text-file was a classic example of the era. Of course, some commands will not produce the same results in most modern Linux shells but you are free to give them a try. I have removed the usual prompt with a dot for easier reading. Lines without a dot are the shell’s responses. Kind of cute if you consider all those were done without a mouse in the command line.
From the C shell:
.make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.
.got a light?
No match.
.sleep with me
bad character
.man: Why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
.rm God (rm: shorthand for remove)
rm: God nonexistent
.make ‘heads or tails of all this’
Make: Don’t know how to make heads or tails of all this. Stop.
.make sense
Make: Don’t know how to make sense. Stop.
.date me
You are not superuser: date not set
.man rear
No manual entry for rear.
.If I had a ) for every dollar Reagan spent, what would I have?
Too many )’s.
.* How would you describe George Bush
.*: Ambiguous.
.%Vice-President
.%Vice-President: No such job.
.”How would you rate Reagan’s senility?
Unmatched “.
.^How did the^sex change operation go?
Modifier failed.
The original file contains more commands, I made a small sampling here. Jason hosts an incredible archive of text-files in his site Textfiles.com. To quote the opening paragraph from his statement:
A wonderful thing happened in the 1980s: Life started to go online. And as the world continues this trend, everyone finding themselves drawn online should know what happened before, to see where it all really started to come together and to know what went on, before it’s forgotten.
For a good night’s read, go take a look. If you feel like overwhelmed among thousands of files, his Top 100 list is a good place to start. You will enjoy the journey.
Note: Some files will not be opened by many browsers. Save and open them with a text editor. If you want to know what my favorite is, it is Impure Mathematics but it requires a passing knowledge of math in order not to miss all of the jokes.
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