I once worked with a guy that wrote a VTAM app that would acquire someone's terminal (easy in the "dumb" terminal days) and display a screen that would look just like the USS MSG10 screen. When the person attempted to logon, it would respond with idiotic messages, after clearing all data out of the buffers. So you would walk into his office for help, he would kill the job that was running, so the screen would clear with you away from it. He would then walk over and proceed to logon as normal. Once you learned the trick, you would first look at the operator info area of the screen to see what type of session you where in before trying to logon.
Wayne Driscoll Product Developer NOTE: All opinions are strictly my own. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Edward Jaffe Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:01 PM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Practical jokes for mainframe systems programmers Rob Scott wrote: > I worked at a site once (many) years ago where some bright spark once wrote a program called "IJKEFT01" whose sole purpose in life was to just ATTACH IKJEFT01 *unless* it was the "target" userid in which case it also ATTACHed an extra TCB that randomly generated strange abends at random intervals. > In school, *someone* wrote a program called "FUN" that simulated the "command prompt" of the interactive system we used. FUN was a simple program that waited for some input from the user, wrote an exact replica of the message that would appear when an unrecognized command was issued (similar to IKJ56500I COMMAND xxxxx NOT FOUND in TSO/E), and then re-issued the prompt and looped back to wait for more input. Watching people's reactions, while FUN was running, was FUN! :-D -- Edward E Jaffe Phoenix Software International, Inc 5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800 Los Angeles, CA 90045 310-338-0400 x318 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
