Ayyyyyyyy!

When I went to college, the school computer being used was a DEC PDP-11/70, a so-called “minicomputer” that actually took up a special air-conditioned room full of cabinets, waist-high disk drives, and tape drives. Students logged onto the computer in an adjacent room (computer lab), which had dozens of dumb terminals attached to the PDP (Programmed Data Processor) through cables running under the raised floor. The terminals with CRTs (monitors) we used were leftovers from the 1960s and ‘70s, so they were on their last legs, but they mostly worked. When one failed, we’d just replace it with one from storage instead of trying to get it fixed.

I was a lab aide for this computer. My main job was helping students use the equipment, and if I happened to know the language they were programming in, I would help them.

At one point, one of the CRTs was giving out. It would do the odd thing of stretching out the middle half of the displayed text to the full height of the screen, thus losing the first and last quarters of the display. (The text was still there, just not visible.) I would usually jostle the terminal until the CRT went back to normal and showed the full screen.

One day, a student came over to my desk, panicked because she was using that particular terminal when it started to act up. She didn’t want to lose her work (no real chance of that), so she asked for my help.

I strolled over to her seat, and like Fonzie on Happy Days, I blew on my left fist and bonked the top of the terminal like The Fonz did to jukeboxes. The screen popped back to normal, showing the student’s work. She was amazed, and I just strolled back to my desk as cool as possible.