manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Which computer trick was cool in the past, but seems completely unimpressive these days?

manpreet 2 years ago

Playing tunes on the squawk box. Most computers had a loudspeaker connected to an internal electrical signal - often the lowest bit of the accumulator or address register. As a program ran, the bit toggled very fast sounding like a demented parrot. The idea was to listen to batch jobs, each job would produce a very specific repetitive noise that would tell you when the job changed - the noise changed. Of course, clever people could get it to play Christmas carols and things. Lame compared to midi and they went out of fashion as the clock rate of machines increased past 10MHz and the output became ultrasonic.

manpreet 2 years ago

Back when I was just starting out in college, circa 1993–94, the school I went to required all incoming Computer Science students to buy a UNIX workstation running Ultrix. No Windows PC for us back then!.

A lot of the Internet back then seemed to be occupied by college students, government long-haired hackers, and a few others who were ahead of the curve living in Australia. A large number of these people were using UNIX in some form to access Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text based chatting platform. Back then, I was living in a dorm next to a hacker who liked to exploit bugs in certain UNIX programs (finger, talk, ntalk) to kick people off their ISP, screw up their terminal display, or flip their screen display in X windows.

manpreet 2 years ago

print “login: “ and accept input.

then, on a different line, print “password: “ and a lot of over-layed characters. and accept input. then printing “invalid password” and accepting input, without the overlay. so you could see a password on the paper they were typing on.

seems pretty lame anymore..

manpreet 2 years ago

1. Changing the startup music of windows xp. I used to do this in my childhood and my friends thought me as some kind of expert.
2. An ability to install Operating system. Yes, my friends (in our childhood) used to pay money to the tech guy for the installation of os.