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I remember people doing that on an AS/400 ramming keystrokes for 5 seconds and then waiting 15 seconds for the system to arrive in the right screen, sometimes even already filling the fields from muscle memory. The first five lines of address data were already entered before the screen loaded.


When I was in high school I had a job after school where they still had a PDP/11 w/real DEC VT-100 terminals. The kid next to me used to do data entry and would get far ahead of the input screen. Except when he made a mistake, and he often did, it would beep. But because he was so far ahead when he made a mistake it would beep for 2 minutes straight. Every time. Max-volume.

Soo.. When he left his desk, I went in and hit SHIFT-SETUP, turned the audible BEL off in the VT-100 setup menu and enjoyed the silence.

When I came back in the office the next day, there was a technician from Digital with the terminal in what looked like 100 pieces on the desk trying to "fix" it. He was pretty upset when he realized it wasn't the speaker and the setting was just turned off (why he didn't check that first, I'll never know). Needless to say as a teenager, I kept quiet about the whole thing.. until now..


Oh wow. That is awesome.




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