Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

When I used to hang out at Radio Shack in the mall to play on a TRS-80's after school, they would draw a pair of asterisks in the corner of the screen and occasionally flash one of them on and off, as they loaded from cassette tape.

One of the older kids who hung out there would tell us newer kids that we could speed up loading by repeatedly pressing the up arrow key on the keyboard.

Of course us new kids didn't realize that the loading speed was completely determined by the cassette tape speed, which the keyboard couldn't possibly affect.

But at least it gave us something to do while waiting, and the older kids something to laugh at.

View on HN

Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once.

Reminds me of the runescape cheat of alt+f4

I'm confident that the Alt+f4 cheat-code was around before Runescape ;) It was inevitably told to every new member at our LAN parties in the late 90s - the few who knew were often assigned admin duty to diagnose network/PC problems (which were frequent).

> Reminds me back in the day using a file sharing/community program called Caraccho (for Mac) - similar to Hotline. Often people would queue up on someone's server (running of their desktop computer) to download a file since the server admin could set how many concurrent downloads from all users were allowed. Folks would send messages to people saying that if they hit Command-Q it makes the client run in "quick mode" which will speed up their download. Of course some folks would fall for this and you'd see their name drop off the server, moving everyone up 1 spot in the queue. Super effective for users that had not setup an avatar indicating they were new to the system and would fall for anything once.

This was also common on IRC to get script kiddies to kick themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button

I'm surprised that article doesn't mention the "Close Doors" button on elevators. It is frequently disconnected and does nothing.

It is perhaps more appropriate to say the button frequently does nothing because you frequently lack the proper permissions... https://youtu.be/ZUvGfuLlZus

In my day, they told new people that Alt-F4 made all kinds of programs run faster, unlock cheat codes, etc. Especially the online games. You always knew the adventurers when you saw "has disconnected from game."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com