________  ________  ________
   2019-02-04                                   /        \/        \/    /   \
                                               /       __/         /_       _/
   Ten thousand  years  ago, when  I was  in  /        _/         /         /
high school, the personal computer was still  \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
a  reasonably  new thing  and  our  school's    /        \/        \/    /   \
network  was  almost  all  MS-DOS  machines,   /        _/         /_       _/
there  was  a  Macintosh  in   the  graphics  /-        /        _/         /
department and later a couple of Windows  95  \________/\________/\___/____/
"multimedia" machines in the Library but the
bulk of them, and certainly every machine in the computer lab were MS-DOS.

   The  idea of  "IT education" was fairly new too and still finding its feet,
padding out the curriculum with stuff like  touch-typing  and word processing.
We did do some BASIC lessons and whatnot but mostly "IT" was just training you
up for office busywork.

   In  my  youth I  wasn't much  unlike  I  am  now, about 50% smart  and  50%
smartass, and even with only a little computer knowledge it wasn't hard to run
rings around the teacher. The work was very easy and very boring so I'd get up
to mischief pretty regularly. One thing  that I remember pretty vividly  was a
couple of running text files  set up by a friend and I (actually  I think they
might  have  been originally WPS  files) on  the server,  README  and X-FILES.
README was a crude running chat or  message log  and X-FILES  was a repository
for jokes and  gags.  You'd just fire  up  the file  in  MS  Works or  EDIT or
whatever  and add lines to the bottom,  of course there was nothing preventing
you deleting or editing other people's additions or anything like that, it was
literally just a shared file.

   Me being  me and being  extremely  triggered by data loss,  I  never delete
anything so I  still have  some fragments  of these two  files  some 23+ years
later. X-FILES  is complete as  far  as I  know, but README is missing a large
chunk  in the  middle  where  it was deleted  either  by a teacher  or another
student. I won't go into the contents of  the files but  suffice it to say  it
was typical 90s teenage boy crap; bad grammar, worse  spelling, lots of angst,
lots of butting heads and lots of casual slurs that would get  you straight up
lynched these days hahaha.

   So why am I bringing all this up?

   Well crash  cut  to  today  and  I'm dinking with  MS-DOS and  Windows  for
Workgroups  3.11 on  a  virtual  machine,  got  it online and  punched  out to
baud.baby for laughs, then hit up circumlunar.space because I know they have a
few super-simple chat clients on there.  I dropped  into schat[1]  and then it
all clicked; I'd come full  circle. From appending  text files in my youth, to
IRC to social media, to video chat,  back to  social media and back further to
IRC and finally, right back to appended text files.

   It made me grin.


[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/1/software/schat



EOF