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15 August, 2024
Almost twenty years ago I started on a project where I was working in the testing lab. We used IRIX systems where we all logged into a common server. To keep in touch, we used a system called the "Pig Curt". No, I don't know why it was called that, but I suspect my coworker Curt was involved.
It was the simplest chat implementation you can imagine. There was a file called "pigcurt.txt" that everyone had write access to. To monitor the chat you'd run "tlpc", which was just an alias for "tail -f pigcurt.txt". If you wanted to say something, you'd run "atpc", which would open up an editor for you to type your message. When you saved and exited the editor, it would add your username and a timestamp to the message, then append it to the end of the pigcurt.txt file. This simple method also made it easy for cron jobs and other tasks to send a message to the log so we could monitor the ongoing tests.
At the end of the day, the file was renamed with a timestamp for archiving, and a new pigcurt.txt file was created. Having these archived chat logs made it easy to find past conversations using grep. It was incredibly simple but worked well for us. Maybe I'm in a nostalgic mood, but I really miss that chat.