Thread View: alt.folklore.computers
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Started by k... Ken Yap
Sun, 07 Jan 1990 05:37
pranks
Author: k... Ken Yap
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 1990 05:37
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 1990 05:37
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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.
Re: pranks
Author: Leonard Erickson
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1990 19:10
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1990 19:10
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k...@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) writes: >... 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. The RS-232 spec is kinda funny. While they omitted a lot of things, it was at least partially based on real-world experience. One section of it *requires* that you be able to short any pin to any other pin without hurting the interface circuitry. What can be real fun is hooking one of these modern RS-232 gizmos up to an old unit. The spec allows mark to be anything from +5v to +25v, and space to be -5v to -25v (I may have mark and space reversed).At the full +/- 25v most modern PC equipment gets more than a little unhappy. -- Leonard Erickson ...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard CIS: [70465,203] "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short
Re: pranks
Author: Henry Spencer
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1990 18:57
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1990 18:57
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In article <1906@bucket.UUCP> leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson) writes: >What can be real fun is hooking one of these modern RS-232 gizmos up to an >old unit. The spec allows mark to be anything from +5v to +25v, and space >to be -5v to -25v (I may have mark and space reversed).At the full +/- 25v >most modern PC equipment gets more than a little unhappy. We actually have two violations of specs here. :-) The first is that RS232B permitted 25, but RS232C and later (I think RS232D is actually the current one) dropped this to a max of 15 at the transmitter. The other is that the receivers are still supposed to be able to take 25, to be fully backward compatible, so anything that can't is broken (but then PCs are broken anyway). -- 1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry he...@zoo.toronto.edu
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