> My DEC-related joke is not quite so amusing. Shortly before April 1st,
> the place I was working did a VMS upgrade. On the night before April 1st,
> I opened up some of the VT100 terminals (read : Most of the ones I could
> get to) and swapped over the horizontal deflection coil leads. I then
> asked the system managers what changes had been made to VMS, and why was
> everyyhting appearing backwards.
>
> Only one system manager knew what I'd done, even though I had a
> reputation for being a hardware person, and even though I'd left the
> VT100 printset open at the video monitor page on my bench (where one of
> the modified VT100s was).
>
> Another VT100 joke (not specifically April 1st) is the modified character
> generator. You wait until you find somebody doing a video monitor repair
> on a VT100, and then you swap the character generator ROM for one either
> with the characters flipped left-for-right or top-for-bottom. You can bet
> they'll spend hours trying all combinations of polarity for the 2
> deflection coils, turn the yoke over, and so on trying to get it right :-).
>
> -tony
Like the field service manager who was told in the login.com
to replace his vt220-sh (southern hemisphere) with a -nh
in order to eliminate the upside down character set. (the downloadable
characters were a vt2xx goodie and not available to the rest of us
field circus types with vt52's and 100's.
Bill
--
bpechter_at_monmouth.com | FreeBSD since 1.0.2, Linux since 0.99.10
Brainbench MVP | Unix Sys Admin since Sys V/BSD 4.2
Unix Sys.Admin. | Windows System Administration: "Magical Misery Tour"
Received on Tue Apr 03 2001 - 20:48:21 BST