jive filter

The damned coolest text filter in the world. The world is a much more interesting place when boring text is in a bad parody of jive talk and has such interstitials as "Slap mah fro," "sheeeit," and "'scoo, bro!" Does such word conversions as "up" to "down" and "friend" to "homey."

I particularly liked the way jive would transform Ronald Reagan to Rolo Kingfish and nigger to gentleman. Around the same time, I was also playing with the spew program, which randomly generated sensational, tabloidesque headlines like "Liz Taylor Gives Birth to Bigfoot on Mars". The best thing about spew is that it could be piped directly into jive, effectively eliminating the need to type anything.

A lazy co-worker used an alias to shorten spew|jive into spive, and a not-so-lazy co-worker created a TCP daemon which would run spive for people who telnetted to a designated port on the box. These were the days before the World Wide Web, mind you, so watching people from all over the world punch into your machine for a dose of spive was still pretty cool.