Indeed Mid-80s would be either using Debian/Slackware, writting a device driver for Linux/BSD, tampering with Video4Linux, cracking TV cards by nearly decoding

Indeed Mid-80s would be either using Debian/Slackware, writting a device driver for Linux/BSD, tampering with Video4Linux, cracking TV cards by nearly decoding Nagra by hand, writting something akin to minimodem/tempest for Eliza, hacking a cable-modem to get free internet access, smashing the stack, doing anything close to what Fabrice Bellard did and so on.