Tony Wachs TW stories wanted 1279

Once upon a time, I was working in HOSS on ANF-10 (It's not just a dog food!). and we were bored.

So, we started to hack together a version of adventure that ran in the DC76 when the -10 crashed (which was often, as the monitor on 1026 was the first version of SMP). It was fun.

The time to field test SMP was upon us and the development team went out to each FT site with a HOSS person to install and talk with the customers. Everything was going well, except one person from HOSS wrote an "interesting" trip report.

No names here, but the guilty party made it sound like he did all the work and the developers who were there did their job fetching coffee.

Tony, Jim, and CDO were just a bit peeed off. Maybe that's a mild way of putting it.

The result was that a bunch of people thought it would be nice to "Hack" the poor slob. (This was when Hacking was good.)

IIRC, CDO hacked DAEMON to look for the guy and log him out without a trace.

I forgot what JMF did.

TW wrote his famous "FLIP.TEC", a teco macro that would take every file in a directory and "flip" the file name, and the extension, and rename the file. e.g. FLIP.TEC would become PILF.CET . He ran it on the person, and nicely left a copy of the macro in their directory so they could undo the damage. But it was not to be. The loser ended up getting operations to do a full restore off all the backup tapes, wasting bunches of time and money getting his files back, all the time running about grumbling about the terrible hackers and dishonest people who worked there.

We laughed about that for quite a while.

But, I mentioned that two of use were bored. So, Dan and I decided to do a hack as well. So, we did, and we thought it would be great to "test" the hack on Tone at 3 AM. Yea, Right.

So, Tony came in, made his "Tasters Choice" instant from the hot water dispenser behind 514 and sat down at the VT52 in his office to see who was on line he always did. Ran SYSDPY. Only one problem. The screen painted from bottom to top and all the lines were done from right to left. It scrolled down, not up.

The VT52 was running in "Reverse video mode". Except for the Parens, brackets, and braces, which were swapped, so rather than have "OPR" come out as "RPO", it was "RPO".

Well, Tony smiled. Then he looked to see where we had patched the monitor. Hmm, no patches. Maybe it's the DC76, I'll just reload it. Hmm, still does it. Maybe I missed the patch. Reload the Monitor (now the VT52 is displaying "DECsystem-10 not running" just like it should) with the new "test" monitor, and it STILL does it.

Well, Tony walked down to the Network area for HOSS, which was just about at the other end of the building, to ask how we did it. At 3:30 AM. We were there, and explained that not only did we patch the DC76, we also patched the DC76 load image so it would start up in the mode. Just for him.

Well, we all had a good laugh, and Tony said it was one of the best hacks he had seen, so we cleared the bit that ran it on his VT52, but set it to run on Bruce's. You remember Bruce, he was that guy with the trip report.

That's not quite the end of the story. Later that day Bruce called Field Service (or as we said, field sabotage) to fix his now "broken" VT52. After the FLIP.TEC fiasco, you think this guy would learn. Well, F-S figured that we had taken his VT52 apart and flipped over the deflection yoke to get it to work that way. So, they tried to put it back the way it was "supposed" to be. Never noticed the dust and that the box had not been touched. Never tried another terminal line to see if it did it there as well. So, they hauled Bruce's VT52 away to repair it and loaned him another.

And the new one did it as well! F-S got a clue and figured it out. Well, everyone laughed about that for some time.

Every time I saw Tony for a few weeks after that, he would smile and say "what a great hack".

Bruce never did get a clue.

-- Some minds are like concrete, thoroughly mixed up and permanently set.