Nigh on ten years ago, in
college when I used to sleep under the counters in the
term room, we had some
SPARCstations in there,
SPARC 1's I believe. This was
SunOS 4.something, not, um . . . they're calling it
Solaris now, aren't they? Anyway, if you
cat'd
anything to
/dev/audio other than an audio file, the
OS would crash.
I am not making this up. We tried it for the same reasons
mcc tried it: "
Gee, I wonder what that would sound like?" -- but we got very different results.
Where it got ugly (a.k.a. "fun") was that the permissions on the
device files were wide open (I'm not a
UNIX guru, but I seem to recall that this should not be the case), so that anybody could
rshell into any
SPARC there and
cat random crap into
/dev/audio, thereby killing the poor thing. Furthermore,
/dev/tty* was permissioned writeable for everybody too: You could
cat bogus error messages to the user's shell tools before crashing the computer ("system going down for
black mass, please
log off. Hail Satan!"
1) -- or
ascii art featuring the grinning face of
J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. So if all the
SPARCs were taken, you could always sit down at a
dumb terminal, zero in on some poor dumb
physics major wasting a valuable
SPARC on useless crap like learning, and fuck with him enough that he'd give up and you could grab the
SPARC.
Uh, kids? Don't do stuff like that. It's bad. Really. :)
1 Did I mention that the
sysadmin was a very sincere
evangelical Christian? And that we were young, stupid, and sleep-deprived enough to think that the Satan nonsense was clever . . . and that smacking people in religious soft spots was clever . . .