When I was at the U, I liked to go into the computer lab in the Physics building. Not that those computers were all that great, but they were always available. The computers in the CS department were always full. (Of course!)
But the really cool thing with Unix was that I could telnet over to the CS lab, reroute the display to my screen in the building across campus, and use the power of the servers without having to fight for a spot in the crowded labs... there are stories about that too.
I was not the only one who did this I am sure. If you typed who, if I remember correctly, it would display all the users "on that machine". There were almost always three or four people logged onto one machine.
I used to work with some die hard Linux guy. I knew enough to shut down his computer one night. He was running some long calculation, I "hacked' into his unoccupied computer and killed all the processes with one command! Then I blamed it on a power failure.
Anyway, he argued more than once that Microsoft Operating Systems stank because you could not remote login to another machine without some third party tool. Well, that tool now ships with Windows and honestly, I think it is very awesome. Yeah, it has been years since I learned to use Remote Desktop, but it never ceases to amaze me.
Posted by Michael at April 25, 2006 03:53 PM