[alarge]

When I started college, all of our classes would assign a temporary (semester-long) account on one of the various Vax 11/780s supplied by the computing center.

Talk wasn't available yet (pretty sure we were on 4.1 BSD), so we'd use write(1) to communicate to each other (e.g., to figure out where someone was sitting in the lab). To block someone from writing to you (often desired, because write(1) would just spew over whatever you were currently looking at), you'd use the "mesg" command, which our University set as default to 'y'. I figured out that running 'mesg y' effectively just gave open write permission to your tty.

With that knowledge in hand, I started a practical joke where I'd remap someone's keys by redirecting an stty command to their tty, e.g.:

  % stty erase e > /dev/tty03

which would make 'e' the backspace key for the duration of their terminal session. Much hilarity ensued.