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You refer to Harry Chesley's HyperBBS which I used to run as my first BBS, before switching to Coherent.

HyperBBS would 'read' every page of a stack to the modem-connected user, buttons would be menu items, editable fields would be inputs, and locked fields would simply be read.

Choosing a menu item would take you to another page..

The modem user didn't see it, but the home menu (IIRC) looked like a house, the cards for logging in were embellished for the benefit of no-one but the sysop.

It's too bad that Pournelle didn't stay kicked off of the 'net.

"Fuck it. Flush him."

The first quote is Hanlon's razor, from Robert J. Hanlon in 1980.

And while you may have coined the second, 13,600 hits in Google suggest you weren't the first to do so. It's been attributed to Vernon Schryver, Paul Ciszek, been dubbed Clark's Law (no 'e') and Grey's Law, and even seen here on Slashdot.

(It's a great line, nonetheless!)

Are sysadmins really THAT bad?

My memory is a little vague, but I do remember some incident where a case was one by a company because one of the programmers triggered an easter egg in the defendant's code, which blatantly showed that the defendant _had_ been stealing code. Can someone who has better recollection than me refresh my memory?

Now, in fact (and I've verified this) if you type BOOT/SYS.WHO (notice that password WHO...) at a TRS-DOS 2.3 prompt, hold down the right combination of keys (2,4,6?) and press return, it'll clear the screen, go into 32 column mode, and display a copyright notice. This copyright notice is not obviously stored in the remaining blocks of BOOT/SYS - from memory the bytes are XORed with the position in the message and with the keyboard data lines before being displayed.

The above is all fact, and I've verifyied it myself.

Now for the rumour, which I can't veryify. Note to lawyers - I'm passing this on as I heard it, and I'm not saying if it is true or not.

One version of TRS-DOS wasn't written by Tandy, but by a 3rd party and licensed to Tandy. Tandy got fed up with paying the license fee and came out with a new version which they claimed was entirely re-written. Said 3rd party claimed that parts of it were taken from his code.

Said 3rd party asked for a TRS-80 Model 1 and a new TRS-DOS disk to prove his case (I don't know if it ever went to court). He went through the above routine, and it displayed _his_ copyright notice. Tandy had copyied the boot granule and hadn't realised there was an easter egg in it.

Later versions kept the easter egg, but with a Tandy message.

Why Win95 is Better than Linux
Feb 15th, 23:09:40

As posted to comp.os.linux.advocacy, by Jon Hamkins.

It's Funny... Laugh. -lt ed

Remember Digital Research. Remember Gary Kildall.

That's not to disrespect the man's memory or the company he founded. But if Kildall had even a shred of business acumen, Bill Gates and Microsoft might only have been a footnote in personal computing history.

There are many stories about what exactly happened, but this link contains a pretty fair discussion.

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because everyone knows that Internet Is Like a Vagina. no?