Hi Bob,
This reminds me of a story from the early '90s, when I worked for a
multi-national food company. (I actually worked for more than one.)
One of the Help Desk guys decided to customize "his own" TPX screen.
He made it say "Welcome to Hell".
When I got in, I booted DOS (IBM PS/2 Model 70), started Windows 3.1 and
then started PCOMM.
As soon as I noticed the "greeting", I walked over to the Help Desk and
nonchalantly asked Billy if he had customized anything since 17:00 the
day before.
He admitted to changing the greeting, but, had no clue that he would be
affecting 2,000 users coast to coast.
After a string of blue words including: "Lard Tunderin' Jeezus" (hat's
Newfoundland-speak for what we now call Whiskey Tango Foxtrot), he
removed it.
I pointed out to him that he was fortunate that I arrived before the
president. He would've bought me a coffee, but, we had free coffee at
work, one of the perqs (a bad pun).
Regards,
David
On 2021-10-11 10:22, Bob Bridges wrote:
Managers have no sense of humour where it doesn't matter. Well, some managers.
I still remember fondly my messing with a coworker's PC menu. I don't remember which
menu system we were using at the time, but Roberto had found some little gag app that
would display a blimp for a few seconds with your selected message scrolling across it.
So while he was out I fixed up his menu so that when he fired up Word, it would 1)
display the blimp ("Roberto is a doofus!"), 2) erase the blimp call from the
Word menu option so it would look normal, and 3) start Word. The Harvard Graphics option
would put the blimp back in his Word option. So until he figured out the pattern, it
would display the blimp at seemingly random intervals, but whenever he looked at the Word
option under the covers there was nothing there.
I was also charmed by a (different) coworker who modified his copy of PC DOS; instead of "Bad
command or file name", it said "Say what, hippo fingers?". I never bothered until
just now to verify that those two messages are exactly the same length; I just assumed that his
replacement was no longer than the official text.
All very harmless. I guess I'm just not a serious hacker.
---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
/* While mathematicians often do not have much humility, we all have lots of
experience with humiliation. -Dan Goldston, in his acceptance speech for the
prestigious Cole Prize */
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of CM
Poncelet
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 22:23
This reminds me of someone at a Company I worked for, can't remember which, where some programmer had displayed a prompt for
whatever to which an end-user replied "f*@k" - upon which the program then replied, "Your place or mine?"
Needless to say, management was not amused by this and the programmer was given a "good talking to" if not then
also put on "garden leave". <grin>
--- On 10/10/2021 15:52, PINION, RICHARD W. wrote:
The only thing I ever put on a system, similar to that, was a TSO program which
produced a crude picture of the one finger salute. You could put whatever
message you wanted on the hand. Silly me, I had the program executing at TSO
logon. Management was not amused.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Sylvester
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 9:36 AM
You could have "protected" the VM systems as much as you want, if a "friend"
send you an exec/script/clist and you execute it. the was actually created as small joke by a
student at one of the EARN/BITNET nodes who did not see that it could escape from the site.
my old friend Helmut on the neighbour node detected "patient 0". It rapidely
entered vnet which was shutdown (to remove all copies afaik), earn bitnet was saved by
Eric Thomas by filtering in rscs. You had to execute it, a global social attack/joke, not
like the other real worm in sendmail
--- On 08/10/2021 16:43, David Spiegel wrote:
"... What about the Christmas Card Worm? ..."
That was AFAIK on a VM system, not, an MVS system.
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