Учитель математики создал первую локальную сеть для офиса и напугал секретаря демонстрацией удаленного запуска программ

My younger brother wasn’t much into farm work, so when I went away to college, my father sold the cows and leased out the farm. To have some spending money, my brother found a job doing what he loved: computer work. But when he was heading away to college, he didn’t know any young person in the town who could handle the work he was doing. Ted, the business owner, asked my brother if there was any way he could help find someone who could do the work. That was when my brother reached out to me. I had just finished a degree in mathematics and computer science, had moved back to my hometown, and was teaching at a local junior college. With my growing family, I needed any extra work I could find. I could only work on Saturdays, and then more in the summer when school was out. I kept everything running on Saturdays, but when summer came, I could deal with any pressing issues or additional tasks. Ted asked if I would take care of some big projects he wanted to do, the first being to set up a network. It seriously wasn’t needed in that small office. There were only three computers. Ted had one, Mary, the secretary, had one, and there was one for me. But if anything was new and exciting, Ted wanted it. I had worked on networks in my programming, but it was with terminals connected to large mainframe computers. The idea of networking personal computers was new, and the available technology was limited. I had never connected PCs together, but I found some books on it. In those days, it required running a computer cable from every computer to every other computer on the network. With only three computers, there weren’t too many wires to run. Setting up the wires didn’t take very long, except for trying to run them along the walls out of the way. However, loading the software and getting the computers to share with each other took quite a while. The software and hardware were so new that there had been limited testing on them, and the documentation was almost nonexistent. But after a few days and many trial-and-error attempts, it was finally working. Ted was excited to see it work and played around with it for days. The software made it possible for the drives on each computer to be seen from the other machines, allowing us to share things more easily. It was the DOS days, and there was no visual interface. A person had to know the right commands to switch to another computer’s drive, and they were different for each machine. I created an individualized chart for everyone. Though Ted loved it, Mary was not as happy. She felt computers were magical, and the fact that she could see what was on the other machines, and we could see the files on hers, made her imagine I was working in the black magical arts akin to voodoo. As a final test to understand how the software transferred data over the network, I had one last question. If I chose to run a program that sat on someone else’s machine, did it process on that person’s machine and display on my screen, or was my machine running the program? I decided to try running a program on Mary’s machine, which was probably a big mistake. Once the program started, it displayed on my machine, but since DOS didn’t really subdivide tasks, the program itself ran as if it were part of the word processor Mary was running. She was typing a document and seldom looked at the screen. But when she did, a letter about half a page back from where she was typing popped up. Then, about ten seconds later, the next one showed. As this continued, she slid her chair away from the computer and stared wide-eyed at the screen. Suddenly, she screamed. “My computer is possessed!” After I explained what I’d done, through gasping breaths, she said, “I’ll hate you forever!”