Worked at the Help Desk, unjamming printers and helping people remember their email passwords. And I stopped back in one year after I'd dropped out and was hanging out in the office and people would be coming in and needing help. The actual worker being busy, I said "I'll help out" and I was helping people for the rest of the morning. Well, I forgot I'd just come from Madison and I was wearing a shirt from the Onion newspaper, one that said quite plainly across the front, "You Are Dumb". Of course the minute the new boss saw me he banned me from the helpdesk and I had to go, unhelpfully, out into the afternoon.
Old tyme net users will remember that the Netscape .93 beta had a beautiful little abstract pattern that moved all purpley while pages were loading. Very relaxing. But when Netscape 1.0 came out the pattern was replaced by a horid pulsing blue "N". Everyone hated it, but no one had as much free time as I. I used Apple's ResEdit to remove the ugly "N", replacing it with the animation from the Neko DA so that there seemed to be a white kitten trying to escape from the box. Loving ResEdit so much I was able to remove every reference to "Netscape" replacing them all with "Nekoscape", hence my email address. It all makes sense!
Norton Disc Doctor. Perhaps the most anthropomorphic disc repair sortware, it shows a little animation of this white suited guy (Peter Norton) looking at a giant hard drive or rebuilding a desktop with a little hammer and a nail. The reference to the files having viruses is fictional.
Our main bank of computers, the VAXes people would actually log onto and use, were named Kinni and Croix in reference to the Kinnikinnick and the St. Croix, two local rivers. So the two rivers machines were refered to colectively as the Rivers Cluster.
Internet Relay Chat. Like America Online's chat rooms, only free and uncensored.
Vend-o-land was a collection of vending machines on the top floor of our building. Late at night a squad of User Assistants would take the elevator up, then jam it so no one else could use it, and then load up on hot chocolate, Dr. Pepper and Snickers bars.
Academic Computing: my employer.
Brian Mogged, who I would link to if I could find his page. A brillant, but twisted individual who allegedly had lycanthopic tendancies. He made me buy the collectible card game Rage on the day it came out, sparking a ten-dollars-a-day habit I've only now been able to resist.
North Hall was home of Academic Computing.
Yes! A drug reference used to symbolize the foolishness of his statement. But if this were Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" people would probably change it.
Ripsig was the Role Player's Special Interest Group. No, I don't know what that first "I" stood for, nor even if the word even had one. I'm such a bad historian.
Decoré is a Macintosh program that served the same function as the System 8 Desktop Pictures control panel does, another example of Apple bundling for free a version of existing commercial software. Want to know why there isn't any voice-recognision software for the mac, yet the PC version sells 25,000 copies a day? When Apple's PlainTalk came out it destroyed sales of the only other voice software out there and ever since then the publishers have been a bit leary of releasing any new programs in the fear that Apple will find them too successful and absorb them. See also: Power Computing. Anyway, the reason I brought up Decoré in the first place is because it used a lot of memory and Help Desk Macintosh (an LCIII) didn't have very much. Also Brian, although using the X-Windows (not MS Windows, mind you) most frequently, chose an exciting picture for the Mac and was prone to violence if anyone spoke of removing it.
Brown Lab was one of the PC labs in the building. Actually, it was the NeXTstep lab, which used Gateway 2000 machines which (if one uses their imagination) excrete their bodily waste in a brown color? It all makes perfect sense. The two Mac labs were the Red and Green labs.
Just say no to drugs.