Article 4462 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: news3.best.com!news1.best.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.cwix.com!192.220.250.21!netnews1.nw.verio.net!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!dpeschel From: dpeschel@u.washington.edu (D. Peschel) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: SIMTEL20 (was Re: Is VMS taboo, or what?) Date: 25 Nov 1998 04:13:11 GMT Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 74 Message-ID: <73g04n$101i$1@nntp1.u.washington.edu> References: <73ela0$51h@hermes.acs.unt.edu> <73fe7g$lpu$1@nntp1.u.washington.edu> <73frls$11n$1@gondor.sdsu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: saul5.u.washington.edu X-Trace: nntp1.u.washington.edu 911967191 32818 (None) 140.142.17.37 X-Complaints-To: help@cac.washington.edu NNTP-Posting-User: dpeschel Xref: news3.best.com alt.folklore.computers:118441 alt.sys.pdp10:4462 In article <73frls$11n$1@gondor.sdsu.edu>, Stewart Stremler wrote: >So...what's the song? From http://www.poppyfields.oaktree.co.uk/filks/authindex.html If you want to do what the intro says, you'll have to write Guy Steele, since Donald Knuth no longer uses e-mail. Luckily, Guy Steele is the real composer; Knuth only wrote the article. -- Derek Title - Telnet Song Original - ? Group - ? Author - Guy L. Steele / D.E. Knuth Intro - D.E. Knuth, 'The Complexity of Songs', Communications of the ACM 27 (4) pp. 345--348, April, 1984 (repetitions indicated; the song is only sung correctly if the appropriate number of repetitions is used) Some comments: Strictly speaking, the song is not part of the article; it was appended afterwards. The composer and lyricist is Guy L. Steele, Jr. The melody has a certain haunting quality that is quite hard to convey in ASCII text. I don't know whether it has ever been played. The composer has email, so it shouldn't be too hard to find out. Song - Telnet Song There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU. Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through, and "quit" is control up-arrow Q. A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type control up-arrow Q. Instead the hacker used TEL-NET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^i times] Q. [repeat verse n times; the choice of n is free] The hacker soon got bored with this, and wanted to get back. He sighed, and started the exponential popping of the stack: The hacked flushed the TEL-NET to the most distant CPU: He couldn't log out until he had killed them all, counting up powers of two: he typed control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^(n-i+1) times] Q. [repeat n times] Whew! The hacker's eyes were bloodshot; his fingers, black and blue; He wanted to log out and and go home to bed, and sleep for a day or two. He typed L O G O U T ... carriage return ... The hacker was on a network with only twenty CPU's. But if he had telnetted to them all, he would not yet be through with typing control up-arrow [repeat 7 times] Q!