I'm not sure why I happened to remember this just now, but here is a little story from before UF. My high school had a disused classroom that had been redesignated the Computer Lab, where the one teacher who knew anything at all about computers taught a BASIC programming course and a couple of other simple introductory things. As you can imagine, a rural high school in Maine in 1989 did not have the most breathtaking array of equipment in there. I think it was mostly TRS-80 Model 4s - the white ones - with a couple of obsolescent PC clones, a few of the cheaper Tandy 1000 sub-models (the ones with the Apple II-style one-piece chassis), and so forth.

Over in the corner was the most advanced machine in the lab, a Macintosh II that had somehow found its way to Stearns High School despite the fact that a) the Mac II was still frontline hardware in 1989 and b) like all Apple products it was eye-poppingly, instinctively-touch-wallet-as-if-feeling-for-a-wound expensive. This had such remarkable features as being able to make sounds other than "beep" and containing a hard disk drive.

On this Mac, someone had installed a typing tutor program. One of the modes this interesting piece of software had was a sort of terminate-stay-resident function where you could run other programs, and the typing software would make the computer say the name of whatever key you pressed. If you typed A, the computer would say "A," and so on. This was turned on most of the time, evidently because whoever turned it on (without the instructor's permission) was the only person around who knew how to turn it off, and he or she was disinclined to do so.

That made the Mac very annoying to use, particularly if you could actually type, because it wasn't interruptible - you had to wait for it to finish saying the name of the key you pressed before you could press another one to any useful effect. For a hunt-and-peck typist this was not so much of a problem, but you get up around 70-80 words per minute and that will seriously screw with your groove. And then... in an stroke of malevolent genius to which I can only doff my cap even now... some anonymous soul (probably the same one who turned on the echo mode in the first place) "improved" it.

Working in secret, probably after school, this inspired malefactor figured out where on the hard drive the resource files for the typing program lived and replaced one of the sounds (which was nothing short of witchcraft at my high school in 1989, believe me). Thereafter, typing a letter or punctuation mark produced the usual result, but if you pressed that wide, blank key at the bottom of the keyboard you got William Shatner intoning gravely,

Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

Did I mention that you had to wait for the computer to finish talking before you could type another key? I did? Well, then you have some idea of how that one simple modification changed the Mac from "annoying in a festive kind of way" to "functionally useless".

Subsequently, the Mac went away for a couple of weeks. Rumor had it that the teacher, unable to suss out what had been done to it, had actually sent it back to Cupertino for re-education. And we all got a stern lecture from the principal about the moral reprehensibility of tampering with school property, which was, after all, provided at great expense so that we would receive the best possible education. To the best of my knowledge, "the vandal" (as he or she was officially labeled) was never caught. Everyone had a theory, but nothing was ever proven and no disciplinary action ensued.

For the record, it wasn't me. I still wouldn't know how to do that on a Mac. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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