Re: Practical jokes for mainframe systems programmers

I once worked with a guy that wrote a VTAM app that would acquire someone's
terminal (easy in the "dumb" terminal days) and display a screen that would
look just like the USS MSG10 screen. When the person attempted to logon, it
would respond with idiotic messages, after clearing all data out of the
buffers. So you would walk into his office for help, he would kill the job
that was running, so the screen would clear with you away from it. He would
then walk over and proceed to logon as normal. Once you learned the trick,
you would first look at the operator info area of the screen to see what
type of session you where in before trying to logon.

Wayne Driscoll
Product Developer
NOTE: All opinions are strictly my own.




-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Edward Jaffe
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 1:01 PM
To: IBM-MAIN@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Practical jokes for mainframe systems programmers

Rob Scott wrote:
I worked at a site once (many) years ago where some bright spark once
wrote a program called "IJKEFT01" whose sole purpose in life was to just
ATTACH IKJEFT01 *unless* it was the "target" userid in which case it also
ATTACHed an extra TCB that randomly generated strange abends at random
intervals.


In school, *someone* wrote a program called "FUN" that simulated the
"command prompt" of the interactive system we used. FUN was a simple
program that waited for some input from the user, wrote an exact replica
of the message that would appear when an unrecognized command was issued
(similar to IKJ56500I COMMAND xxxxx NOT FOUND in TSO/E), and then
re-issued the prompt and looped back to wait for more input. Watching
people's reactions, while FUN was running, was FUN! :-D

--
Edward E Jaffe
Phoenix Software International, Inc
5200 W Century Blvd, Suite 800
Los Angeles, CA 90045
310-338-0400 x318
edjaffe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/

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