At 10:13 PM 11/28/02 -0500, William Taylor wrote:
Someone out there may even know how to change that hand cursor into using the correct finger....
I always laugh at the "finger" command in Unix: on the mainframe at one of the universities I was at back in the 70s, someone had written a "finger" command and added it to the commands available from the remote terminals. However, on that particular system, typing "finger <username>" would send an ASCII-art picture of . . . ahem . . . the Hawaiian good-luck gesture which would appear on the screen of the terminal which <username> was logged in to . . .
(I would not be surprised if that program got started the way another one did: the mainframe tended to go down for an hour or two a day _in addition to_ the downtime for scheduled maintenance, and sometimes when one was sitting in front of a non-functioning terminal waiting for it to start working again--hopefully soon--rather than giving up and going home for the night, people passed the time by switching the terminal to "local" mode and designing ASCII art on the screen. One night I drew a rocket, then made it "launch" by scrolling it up off the screen, and later I incorporated that into a program. Ah, the days of low-budget animation . . .)
--Ronn! :)
I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon.
I never dreamed that I would see the last.
--Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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