Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile).Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.
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