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Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

That reminded me:

Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)

My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.

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I recall playing an 80s-ish submarine (WW2?) game with a "spreadsheet mode".

Lots of old games have this, I played many MicroProse flight simulators and they all had it.

These days even Tinder (website version) has a boss-key.

But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.

That's probably Gato (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gato_(video_game)

Better known as "boss key": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

Creative use case for a TSR :)

The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)

When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.

Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.

That's clever!

Norton Utils had it. Mind blowing for its time.

why was it pointless? it worked in the text guis of the time

You're right, TUIs had mouse support. This is a TSR, and exits to shell after running, so there's a mouse cursor visible without any app running. Like, there's nothing to "click" :)

Another use of TSR !

I implemented a password protected access to A:

So, yeah, yes he was.

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