🚀 go-pugleaf

Before I relate my story,  I'd just like to make a little correction
to the "rm *" discussion.  Somebody pointed out the common mistake of
not SHIFT'ing in time when typing "rm *.o", getting "rm *>o", and
claimed that you get just one empty file named "o".  Actually, the
shell creates the file "o" before calling rm, so the command unlinks
that, too;  you get nothing at all in your directory.  (Not that you'd
be worrying about this minor fact when all your sources are gone,
but...)

Now for the lore:

This happened back in BHU Varanasi, India. The university computer
center had just been given a set of BBC Microcomputers (for
educational computing in schools) for training schoolteachers on.
These BBC Micros were beauts: 8-bit 6502 machines, they came with
their own color monitors with 16 colors, 5 1/4 " floppy drives, and a
native Pascal-like BASIC. They had lots of neat options, too-- D/A
boards built in, three-channel music... And they were given to us
(undergrads in the engineering college) to play with!

The BASIC not only allowed any characters inside comments, but added
its own control codes to the basic screen driver routines (the BASIC
was resident in a ROM and loaded up at boot time along with the OS,
so the machine was always in BASIC expr-eval mode), making it possible
to save an ascii file full of control characters and simply EXEC'ing
it from BASIC... What we did was: wrote a nice long program to do
graphics on the screen, and exit with a taunt to ``try reading the
code to discover how this is done!''. Here's the program:

	5 REM ^H^H^H^H^HPirate! BLECHHH!!^M^S
	10 (some useful code)
	...
	...
	10000 REM ^Q

where the ^H characters represent actual backspaces in the REM
command, and the ^S/^Q codes represent the control characters used to
stop and start terminal output! Naturally, when anyone tried to see a
LISTing of the source, all he saw was this:

	> LIST
	Pirate! BLECHHH!

	> _

Pretty frustrating, and the code is still lying around at the BHU
computer center. I wonder if anyone knows how it works....

	Sudheer.
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