.plan Early for Athena Evacuation Week

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Keep in mind as you read this that my purpose is not to flame about
Athena.  Each of you has your own horror story -- a bug in compress,
mail being held up for four days, and so on.  I am not writing this to
complain about Athena, but to make fun of it.  (Not to mention today's
Tech editorial.)

"6.3B" came to Athena and stayed there for the past two months.  We
were greeted by a cheap bitmap of a stylized owl.  At the athena%
prompt users were able to enjoy the listing of "/afs/athena.mit.edu."
(Get the double meaning of the word "mit"?)

A constantly-changing global message appears in a consule window.  We
learned from this message, among other things, that "Sometimes logout
doesn't work.  If you leave and logout fails, anybody who walks up to
the workstation has access to your files."  (Hey, Guenther, let's
delete this guy's thesis, ja?)

But we must not dwell on the past.  Our task now, as I see it, is to
ensure that our intelligence is not similarly insulted next term.  By
this I mean we should....  well, you'll see.  :-)

My .plan requires only five days of your time, starting Monday the
sixth.  Through sustained effort on your part during Athena Evacuation
Week, it won't be long before we're all using Word on our Macs.


MONDAY:

Welcome to x-slog-in.  Remember how all this month you've been typing
your passowrd every day in order to read your mail and work on your
papers?  I want two thousand of you each to log in at the same time.
Then get your friends to.  Run out of consoles yet?  Good.


TUESDAY:

It's student night on the network.  Now, fifty of you with homedirs on
talos should go to the building 66 cluster.  (They might have trouble
seating you, so bring your own chairs.  If they're blue and have
"ATHENA" stenciled on the back, you should definitely return them.)
Work on the papers that are due on Wednesday.  


WEDNESDAY:

Have you noticed the proliferation lately of lame little contests
(e.g., tetris, hextris, xtank, wanderer, xmille, mboggle, rogue,
xtrek, and wumpus)?  It's as if someone deep in the bowels of Athena
is thinking, "If there's on thing these users want, it's something to
keep their minds off the building 4 repeater."  It's a sweet thought,
and one which bears emulation.  Here's how.

Ten of you should punt all your classes Wednesday and go to an ARA
facility.  Brainstorm, like they do in "The Watchmaker Zone," about
how to write xsimcity.  Need we say more?


THURSDAY:

I'm not a watchmaker, but I have a feeling some of you are.  (Well,
OK, I'm one, too.)  What would happen if someone took apart the
BSD sources and figured out exactly how it works?  Just to satisfy
your natural curiosity, find a few security holes.

Now wait for Paladium, and deduct negative eighty-thousand dollars
from every undergraduate's account.


FRIDAY:

We are fed up.  We must convince ourselves that the printers symbolize
all that is wrong with Athena (after all, that's where Scribe output
goes).  Everyone with a hideous plastic toy (i.e., a transparency)
should drop it into an Athena printer.


You get the point.  We don't have the passion to act as we would have
in the sixties -- and besides, they aren't mainframes anymore so
"cookie monster" wouldn't do any good.  If a few of us get together
and follow my Evacuation Week .plan, we may find one day that we have
driven Athena to CalTech.