🚀 go-pugleaf

Well, I have a couple of interesting stories to tell:

I used to attend the High School for Engineering Professions,
a magnet school in Houston, Texas.

After I left, one of my best friends with a creative streak was 
made system manager (he was a student, by the way).

He had a utility that would really annoy and confuse
the hell out of new BASIC programmers.. it broadcast 
or forced a '0' at random to terminals. Needless to
say, this played havoc with line numbering.

He later expanded this program to do other interesting things,
including the infamous 'Give me a cookie, I want a cookie'
which of course went away as soon as you typed 'cookie'.
(He didn't originate the idea, just stole it)

His best piece of work, however, was quota blackjack.

Each student had a 50 block (25k?) quota in which to 

work on their class assignments. Sometimes, for whatever
reason, a student would request more quoata. An option
was added the "PLEASE" program, which became "BEG" and 
later "GROVEL" to allow them to beg, whine, plead
and or offer sex for another block or two. 
Sufficiently creative begging got you more quota.

When this wore thin, he decided that he didn't really care
HOW the quota was distributed, the students had a fixed
amount and that was that. So, he created quota blackjack,
you could bet quota, and play the computer for disk space.

It proved so popular that an option had to be added 
allowing people to lend each other quota. Unfortunately,
as you have probably already guessed, the computer
cheated. By the end of the semester, 90% of this disk
space had been reclaimed, and people were pooling 
disk space in one account just to get projects done.


The Real System Manager figured all's fair in love and
blackjack and was later promoted into Administration
for the Houston Independant School District.

The author, Richard Franklin (hi, Richard!) is now an
expensive Vax Systems Manager in Dallas, and quite
probably making his users' life hell.

David Neal
abbadon@nuchat.uucp
a
p.s., this was all on pdp 11/34 with 124k of memory,
20mb of disk and rsts/e 7.* and 8.*