🚀 go-pugleaf

Speaking of pranks, here's one we didn't plan ahead of time.

Sitting in the graphics lab some years ago, chewing the fat with the
usual suspects and generally wasting time, I was suddenly posessed to
take a soda can ring tab and short pins 2 and 3 of the RS232 connector
at the back of a Teleray T1061. This meant that the transmit was looped
back to the receive.  Till this day I still wonder why I didn't blow
any driver chips. Then we went to the plug board and connected the
terminal to a Tektronix graphics terminal that was in an adjoining room
and normally dedicated to logging onto the Cyber. In effect the
Tektronix and Teleray were connected in full-duplex.  Then we typed in
a login banner and sat to wait for a poor victim. One soon arrived and
we crowded around the Teleray, yelling suggestions for replies.  The
dialog went like this:

	/logon,user,password
	some innocuous reply

(Note: Even though the responses were coming back the user one
character at a time, he suspected nothing, such was the reputation of
the Cyber for slowness!)

	/catalog
	no such program. try dogalog.
	/dogalog
	sorry, i can't get out of my kennel. do it yourself.

And similar inane responses. This went on for a couple of minutes
until the user noticed a correlation between his commands and the
bursts of laughter in the next room.

Next week: what static sparks can do to terminals and thermal
printers.