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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




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