At the dawn of the computer age
By which I mean the mid 1970s, we were the very first generation to do computer studies at school. We had a small room containing a teleprinter, connected to the local university's mainframe. For those too young to remember, a teleprinter is like a typewriter on steroids. And for those too young to remember typewriters, you can just sod off.

Anyway, the key point is that it typed its output onto paper. So, when one of us computer geeks set it to print "Mr Cooper is a Wanker" over and over again, it wasn't just on the screen, but on a rapidly increasing pile of paper spewing out of the machine.

Cleverly, he'd even turned off the BREAK key, so it couldn't easily be stopped. Rather more wonderfully, though apparently accidentally, he'd made it print on every teleprinter in every school in the entire city...

Sheer class.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 8 Sep 2011, 13:56, Reply)