TELNET SONG - Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Poems

 
 

Poems » guy l. steele jr » telnet song

TELNET SONG
There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU.
Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through,
and "quit" is control up-arrow Q.

A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU.
He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type
control up-arrow Q.

Instead the hacker used TEL-NET to get to another CPU.
He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type
control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^i times]
Q.
[repeat verse n times; the choice of n is free]

The hacker soon got bored with this, and wanted to get back.
He sighed, and started the exponential popping of the stack:

The hacked flushed the TEL-NET to the most distant CPU:
He couldn't log out until he had killed them all,
counting up powers of two: he typed
control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^(n-i+1) times]
Q. [repeat n times]

Whew!

The hacker's eyes were bloodshot; his fingers, black and blue;
He wanted to log out and and go home to bed, and sleep for a day or two.
He typed L O G O U T ... carriage return ...

The hacker was on a network with only twenty CPU's.
But if he had telnetted to them all,
he would not yet be through with typing
control up-arrow [repeat 7 times]
Q!
       -