[geeks] Best Vista story I've seen

[Sheldon T. Hall]

Quoth Sridhar Ayengar ...
> Doug McLaren wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 07:18:07PM -0500, Charles Shannon 
> > Hendrix wrote:
> > 
> > | > > Can you imagine the look someone would have given you 
> > | > > if you asked them,
> > | > > in 1986, if you could use their Cray to play Doom?
> > 
> > Not everything done on the big iron was serious :)
> 
> Indeed.  Many of the first games ran on big iron.  8-)

"My" first computer, an NCR 315, had wound core memory.  This put out a lot
of RFI; so much so that we had a program that would broadcast Christmas
carols to an AM radio sitting on one of the memory cabinets.  The commands
in the programs were chosen for their RFI emissions, not their usefulness in
context, so the program listing (in NEAT, a macro assembler) read like the
result of some psychotic programmer's all-night drug-and-drink bender.

At the conclusion of the carol program, it ran off a Snoopy calendar on the
line printer.  I appropriated that code for the end of the annual 1099
report the last year I was there.

-Shel