1) $ cat /vmlinuz | write $VICTIM

2) Laugh as your friend's terminal goes audibly berserk, drawing the attention of everybody in the computer lab.

3) Apologize for getting your friend in trouble with the printing office.

Put 'mesg n' in your shell startup file to prevent that.

We had an old IBM dotmatrix printer in our computer room back in the day, which the operators loved to warn us would actually catch fire if we didn't get our CR/LF vs LF situation solved on some of those 100-page reports that management always needed to have printed on Friday afternoon, when nobody would be around.

One time, I forgot to add the check to the queue, and I got aroused from my Friday hijinks with the alarming call that the Halon system had gone off and our operator wanted my blood. The printer had actually caught fire, due to 20,000 missing LF characters putting every single line on the same character (carriage return), burning a hole in the platen and yeah .. setting off the Halon.

That's when I learned, as a junior programmer, the value of pipes.

> That's when I learned, as a junior programmer, the value of pipes.

Sounds like a perfect BOFH episode.

I knew a few BOFH's in those days. It was truly a wild and woolly time for us junior programmers, conducting the necessary voodoo to gain access to the "aquarium", getting a chilly terminal assigned either far away in some dark corner under the Halon horn, or .. even worse .. right next to the Day Operator, whose shoulder-surfing capabilities induce trauma even now, thinking about it .. good times, good times.

The day I got my own pizzabox and ethernet connection, and thus didn't ever have to bother an Operator for access to anything, ever again, was another big step up in the career path I chose for myself .. still, I miss those grumpy old fuckers. They had good stories to tell, usually, and I still 'sync;sync;sync' to rewind tape, now and then, by muscle memory ..

I think you have a few years on me then. When I was an undergrad, we had a slightly elderly vax 11/70 (iirc) and a line printer that probably deserved 3-phase power.

Oh, this was the mid-80's and the Vaxen were still around, being replaced by stuff from WANG and Tandem .. but that line printer was sacred for some reason, it stayed in operation (after repair) until the late 90's ..

actually, in most places wang got replaced by vax and later by pcs.

Not in my experience. :P

wang went bankrupt in 1992, while the vax line soldiered on for another 10 years or so. anyone that replaced a vax with a wang misread the market badly, particularly with the introduction of pc wordprocessors.

What is the collective term for a group of Wangs?

Is it Wangers? A wank? Management? Parliament/senate?

We used to say "wangen", as in "hey wangers, did you shut down the wangen?", which was properly used a source of much mirth for a few years ..