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by bombcar 1162 days ago
What's even more fun is when you have actual experts doing things with the very computer you're fixing; using tools and datasets way beyond my comprehension, get amazed by opening a terminal or CMD and fixing something.
2 comments

One of my proudest moments in masters was they had the masters students demo each week to the undergrads. So I'm in a big auditorium on a pc with a projector behind me. This was in 2000, computer still had a floppy drive. They wiped the computer every week, Windows NT.

I popped in the floppy did D: and typed `ls`... and error, and the whole class laughed at me. Having been switching a lot lately I typed, I believe, `echo dir > C:\Windows\ls.bat` and (or whatever the right pipe command is, it's been a while), and typed `ls` again. Then double birded the whole class. And started launching the demo.

There were audible gasps esp from the professor who was like, hold up, what did you just do. So I spent 3 minutes explaining it to the class, then we did our demo.

I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.

>I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.

Me too son, me too.

Ron is that you?
Modern computing has definitely lost the "computer is whatever you have the time / skill to make it" default understanding.

For all its faults, IMHO that's the greatest strength of Unix-alike philosophy: making small hacks easy, if you know how the system is composed.

Wait, they were familiar with terminal commands (dir vs ls) but they didn't know how PATH worked? Or am I misunderstanding something
I seemed like a genius once to it support at big co when I heard him having issues with "ok I fixed the text what do I do now" which I just said esc:wq. Guy was like what the helly you say, I repeated. He was like thanks and wrote it on the bottom of the white board. From them on I skipped the line at that office.

"Why does he get to skip the line. Oh this is his 3rd time in here this week" (8 am on a Monday).