I found this on Biotek.net but before you try this out you must promise that you are not currently working in the kitchen, have something in the oven or watching the baby. I found it on my lunch break so that doesn’t count.

You will be hooked.*waves hand in an arc in front of your face*

You will not be able to continue anything else you are doing. *waves hand in an arc in front of your face*

All set? This works in Windows XP (and on Windows Vista too, as reported).

* Go to Start
* Click Run
* Type: Telnet.
* [A DOS window (also known as a command prompt) will appear.]
* In the DOS window type the letter “o” (without the quotes)
* Then type: towel.blinkenlights.nl so that the line looks like this:

Microsoft Telnet> o towel.blinkenlights.nl

* Press Enter

Enjoy the show.

I cut my programming teeth on a Radio Shack TRS-80, with a cassette player attached to it to save the running bunny program we were supposed to write to pass the first exam.

The very first computer I owned did not have a hard drive, but ran on two 5,25inch floppy disks, which when discarded made very good solar eclipse viewers. I played Prince of Persia from a floppy disk till the wee hours of the morning and ran Wordstar 2 on a second floppy drive with the DOS bootdisk in the first. The brands Verbatim and Maxell were preferred, even when the disks shrank to 3.5 inches.

When I finally got my first hard disk it was a whopping 120MB. Yey! Now I could run Windows 3.1 and save my files in folders. I learned how to use a mouse. The floppy had shrunk to 3.5 inches by this time, black with color coded labels. In a few more months Windows 95 came out with the floppy installers. I was in heaven.

But it wasn’t until I got my first taste of the Internet that I realized this was what I wanted to be involved in for the rest of my life.