|
|
|
|
|
|
by amichal
1147 days ago
|
|
|
I did a summer program at MIT around then and remember a program that let you send popup messages in xwindows to other users or to a channel. You could subscribe to any channel and use wild cards. I remember being hacked by someone to subscribe "*" and being unable to use my terminal for a while until i figured out how to unsubscribe without being able to see what i was typing under the wall of messages. I thought it was called zyphermail but the interent seems to have no memory of this. |
|
|
Back in the days of ARPANET mailing lists, there used to be an "educational" mailing list called "please-remove-me", that was for people who asked an entire mailing list to remove them, instead of removing themselves, or sending email to the administrative "-request" address.
So when somebody asked an entire mailing list to remove them, somebody else would add them to the "please-remove-me" mailing list, and they would start getting hundreds of "please remove me" requests from other people, so they could discuss the topic of being removed from mailing lists with people with similar interests, without bothering people on mailing lists whose topics weren't about being removed from mailing lists.
It worked so well that it was a victim of its own success: Eventually the "please-remove-me" mailing list was so popular that it got too big and had to be shut down...
...Then there was Jordan Hubbard's infamous "rwall incident" in 1987:
http://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35759965