Oh wow, I remember workman now. At least I had university Internet, even if the whole country's net was taken down once when someone tried a video chat.

It must have been a year or two later that I wired a doorbell between DTR (I think) and CTS on a Sparc workstation, with a program that broadcast a UDP packet to a Tcl/Tk program running on multiple lab machines whenever tcdrain() unblocked.

It wasn't unfortunately. The SPARC 10 had no built in CD drive like the newer 5 and 20 models so that couldn't control the audio interface and it didn't issue the right incantations to the CD drive I had. I was cheap so it was a non-Sun drive. There were no standards back then past things like MCI which only worked on PCs running DOS and windows 3.1.

There's a whole thread on Usenet somewhere with me complaining about this. I tried to find it but couldn't now unfortunately as it would be funny :)