💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~noface › ais.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 12:35:13. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I've spent a few years thinking about the old days of computing. Back then, I learned to program in BASIC on various PCs (Atari, Apple IIe, Tandy, etc.) up until high school, where I was able to join a class specifically aimed at introducing students to the internet of the 90s through a Unix account. I was very fortunate to be invited to it. Seats were limited. We learned about Unix, email, telnet, as well as programming in Fortran. The final project was a scientific presentation where we used Fortran to process a data set and present our conclusions. The program was called "Adventures in Supercomputing", and I remember it fondly.
The AiS program was designed to introduce a group of students to the world of the internet, unix, email, chat, and most of all, computer programming. Over the course of the school year, a set of hand picked students from each of the participating schools would collaboratively learn in the classroom and across the internet. We were taught the basics of Unix, csh, core utilities, and programs like pine and pico. We learned how to program in FORTRAN and process data from CSV files. We learned about the early Web, Gopher, and Veronica, which we used for research and recreation. We were given dial-up accounts to a university, and were allowed to use SLIP or PPP to jack in from home. It was magical. The school year would end with a science project completed by teams of students, where they would use FORTRAN to process data, do some math, and output data. This data would then be graphed and presented in the ever familiar tri-fold science board at a fair in Nashville, TN.
Being a curious person, I ended up poking around the various directories on the Unix server. I found things like group listings, user modifications, chmod, chgrp, etc. All sorts of nifty programs that I could *try* to execute, but I didn't have permissions. That didn't stop me. I ended up trying to create an account for my sister. As it turns out, the attempt of creating a user account was frowned upon, even though it ended up doing nothing. I was reprimanded in front of the AiS class andmMy Unix account was suspended for a week. A slap on the wrist for being curious.
I still poked around the system. AiS had multiple schools using the system at similar times. There were quite a few schools involved in AiS. As I was poking around, I found a command called `wall`, which allowed me to send a message to all logged in users. I created a smiley face, with the expected phrase "Don't Worry. Be Happy." as it's message, and sent it to all logged in users. This caused no physical damage to code, or projects, but it was very disruptive. Since the class was centered around programming, the command overwrote the screen with the smiley face and caused quite a few students to freak out, even though there was no damage done to the files they were working on. I was taken aside and reprimanded for usage of the command during the time that I used it, but nothing more happened to me.
One week we were given a project to define and animate geometrical solids over time with math. We could then submit this specification to the *super computer* and it would send us back a movie of the animation. I forget what my animation ended up being (spheres rotating around each other or something), but I will never forget one of the other student's animation. They animated a cylinder entering and exiting the hole of a torus, with a brief pause when the cylinder was fully in the torus. They denied everything. The teacher wasn't very happy either.