6 ms·

There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.

by ww520 3y ago

tryauuum 3y ago
also wall(1)
- andrewSC 3y ago
  Also w(1)
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  Nothing beats walling the undergrad project server.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" of March 31, 1987. It was waaaay more than just reported to the local sysadmin, and almost got UCB kicked off the ARPANET. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard#rwall_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard#rwall_incident https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 Jordan Hubbard wrote: "One of the people who received my message was Dennis Perry, the Inspector General of the ARPAnet (in the Pentagon), and he wasn't exactly pleased. (I hear his Interleaf windows got scribbled on)" >Here's the explanation he sent to hackers_guild, and some replies from old net boys like Milo Medin (who said the program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA Dennis G. Perry said they would kick UCB off the Arpanet if it ever happened again), Mark Crispin (who presciently proposed cash rewards for discovering and disclosing security bugs), and Dennis G. Perry himself: (See https://www.ndia.org/events/2021/8/18/1341---swif-2021/speakers/milo-medin https://www.ndia.org/events/2021/8/18/1341---swif-2021/speak... if you don't know who Milo Medin is!) Milo S. Medin replied: >Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...). Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong people with this move! >Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention to such people. Jordan's infamous rwall incident is the kind of thing that might have triggered the rumored "explosive bolts" the Defense Communication Agency was once talking about installing, that would violently separate the MILNET and ARPANET in case of national emergency. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171294 >DCA must have the ability to partition the ARPANET and MILNET in case of an "emergency", and having non-DCA controlled paths between the nets prevents that. There was talk some time ago about putting explosive bolts in the mailbridges that would be triggered by destruct packets... That idea didn't get far though...
  - psychphysic 3y ago
    So many acronyms
    - itronitron 3y ago
      remarkably few, considering the organizations involved :(
- darkwater 3y ago
  And write(1)
mingus88 3y ago
That was such a mind blowing experience coming from a DOS background. It would split your terminal horizontally and you could see each other type in real time. Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I was working. We've been married for 20 years now.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  "talk" was often bugged (and IIRC, used UDP) so it was soon updated by xtalk and then ytalk. ytalk was like the kitchen sink of talk, with a huge feature set and compatibility with everything that went before. Everyone had to get ytalk for sure.
  - skykooler 3y ago
    I use ytalk on a VPS that me and a friend have ssh logins for. It's still a neat way of communicating that I don't think any modern chat apps do.
- ww520 3y ago
  The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game. I've wasted so much time late into the nights playing the game in the lab instead of doing coursework. The admin came to the lab from time to time and said we're hogging the workstations with the game and banned the game during daytime.
  - gwerbret 3y ago
    > The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game. Anything like mtrek? It's still around [0], and even over telnet [1]. 0: https://mtrek.com https://mtrek.com 1: telnet://mtrek.com:1701
    - ww520 3y ago
noisy_boy 3y ago
I remember that one of the financial banking software we were using had an internal chat that was basically using "write"(?) underneath to send messages to another users terminal (it was running on Sun Solaris I think).
- alarge 3y ago
  When I started college, all of our classes would assign a temporary (semester-long) account on one of the various Vax 11/780s supplied by the computing center. Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1 BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the lab). To block someone from writing to you (often desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg" command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave open write permission to your tty. With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty command to their tty, e.g.: % stty erase e > /dev/tty03 which would make 'e' the backspace key for the duration of their terminal session. Much hilarity ensued.
- skissane 3y ago
  It always annoyed me that the Unix terminal subsystem is too dumb to handle multiple writers to the same terminal at once without them potentially corrupting each other’s output. There are some techniques to reduce the incidence of this but none of them are foolproof, whereas a better design could be. Maybe that was too hard when people used to use hardcopy terminals (actual ttys), although even there it possibly could have done better than it actually does. But certainly by the time people had softcopy terminals with cursor positioning (like the DEC VT series and its emulators), a better experience could have been possible. For example, what if the functionality of curses was actually in the tty driver, so if another process wrote to the terminal it would appear as a new window, which could then be dismissed without altering the output of the underlying program? Or, to avoid putting too much in kernel space, the tty subsystem could live in a user-space daemon (possibly one process per terminal), and then applications would talk to it over IPC
  - 3y ago
mr_toad 3y ago
Back when I was at university the x servers on our terminals were not secured, and other people could open output on your terminal. A favourite was a program that sent cockroaches scurrying around the screen whenever you moved a window.
- throwaway744678 3y ago
  Ha, ha! Same here... The classical joke here was to send an xkill command: next mouse click will terminate whatever window was under the cursor.
- vidarh 3y ago
  My university got a bunch of SGI Indy's for cheap as a marketing ploy by the importer, and everyone could log in to all the machines. It became a lot of peoples first experience of the privacy implications of webcams (they had them built in) and taught a lot of people the value of paying attention to the privacy covers.

There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.

by ww520 3y ago

There's the talk command on Unix. We used to do a 'who' to find out who're on the system and 'talk' to them.

tryauuum 3y ago

also wall(1)

andrewSC 3y ago
Also w(1)
KyeRussell 3y ago
Nothing beats walling the undergrad project server.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" of March 31, 1987. It was waaaay more than just reported to the local sysadmin, and almost got UCB kicked off the ARPANET. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard#rwall_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard#rwall_incident https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138 Jordan Hubbard wrote: "One of the people who received my message was Dennis Perry, the Inspector General of the ARPAnet (in the Pentagon), and he wasn't exactly pleased. (I hear his Interleaf windows got scribbled on)" >Here's the explanation he sent to hackers_guild, and some replies from old net boys like Milo Medin (who said the program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA Dennis G. Perry said they would kick UCB off the Arpanet if it ever happened again), Mark Crispin (who presciently proposed cash rewards for discovering and disclosing security bugs), and Dennis G. Perry himself: (See https://www.ndia.org/events/2021/8/18/1341---swif-2021/speakers/milo-medin https://www.ndia.org/events/2021/8/18/1341---swif-2021/speak... if you don't know who Milo Medin is!) Milo S. Medin replied: >Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...). Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong people with this move! >Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention to such people. Jordan's infamous rwall incident is the kind of thing that might have triggered the rumored "explosive bolts" the Defense Communication Agency was once talking about installing, that would violently separate the MILNET and ARPANET in case of national emergency. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34171294 >DCA must have the ability to partition the ARPANET and MILNET in case of an "emergency", and having non-DCA controlled paths between the nets prevents that. There was talk some time ago about putting explosive bolts in the mailbridges that would be triggered by destruct packets... That idea didn't get far though...
- psychphysic 3y ago
  So many acronyms
  - itronitron 3y ago
    remarkably few, considering the organizations involved :(
darkwater 3y ago
And write(1)

mingus88 3y ago

That was such a mind blowing experience coming from a DOS background. It would split your terminal horizontally and you could see each other type in real time. Before the days of SMS, and even before the days of instant messengers like ICQ and AIM, I taught the split-screen `talk` command to my girlfriend so we could chat while I was working. We've been married for 20 years now.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
"talk" was often bugged (and IIRC, used UDP) so it was soon updated by xtalk and then ytalk. ytalk was like the kitchen sink of talk, with a huge feature set and compatibility with everything that went before. Everyone had to get ytalk for sure.
- skykooler 3y ago
  I use ytalk on a VPS that me and a friend have ssh logins for. It's still a neat way of communicating that I don't think any modern chat apps do.
ww520 3y ago
The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game. I've wasted so much time late into the nights playing the game in the lab instead of doing coursework. The admin came to the lab from time to time and said we're hogging the workstations with the game and banned the game during daytime.
- gwerbret 3y ago
  > The one program truly blew my mind at the time was Netrek - the first networked multi-player realtime graphical space fighting game. Anything like mtrek? It's still around [0], and even over telnet [1]. 0: https://mtrek.com https://mtrek.com 1: telnet://mtrek.com:1701
  - ww520 3y ago

noisy_boy 3y ago

I remember that one of the financial banking software we were using had an internal chat that was basically using "write"(?) underneath to send messages to another users terminal (it was running on Sun Solaris I think).

alarge 3y ago
When I started college, all of our classes would assign a temporary (semester-long) account on one of the various Vax 11/780s supplied by the computing center. Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1 BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the lab). To block someone from writing to you (often desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg" command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave open write permission to your tty. With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty command to their tty, e.g.: % stty erase e > /dev/tty03 which would make 'e' the backspace key for the duration of their terminal session. Much hilarity ensued.
skissane 3y ago
It always annoyed me that the Unix terminal subsystem is too dumb to handle multiple writers to the same terminal at once without them potentially corrupting each other’s output. There are some techniques to reduce the incidence of this but none of them are foolproof, whereas a better design could be. Maybe that was too hard when people used to use hardcopy terminals (actual ttys), although even there it possibly could have done better than it actually does. But certainly by the time people had softcopy terminals with cursor positioning (like the DEC VT series and its emulators), a better experience could have been possible. For example, what if the functionality of curses was actually in the tty driver, so if another process wrote to the terminal it would appear as a new window, which could then be dismissed without altering the output of the underlying program? Or, to avoid putting too much in kernel space, the tty subsystem could live in a user-space daemon (possibly one process per terminal), and then applications would talk to it over IPC
- 3y ago

mr_toad 3y ago

Back when I was at university the x servers on our terminals were not secured, and other people could open output on your terminal. A favourite was a program that sent cockroaches scurrying around the screen whenever you moved a window.

throwaway744678 3y ago
Ha, ha! Same here... The classical joke here was to send an xkill command: next mouse click will terminate whatever window was under the cursor.
vidarh 3y ago
My university got a bunch of SGI Indy's for cheap as a marketing ploy by the importer, and everyone could log in to all the machines. It became a lot of peoples first experience of the privacy implications of webcams (they had them built in) and taught a lot of people the value of paying attention to the privacy covers.