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.