this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
373 points (97.7% liked)

Asklemmy

43962 readers
1360 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Transcendant@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

This was back in the 90s... we figured out a simple way to make 'empty' files using the spacebar ascii and qbasic. We'd have a simple interface, flashing cursor, and you'd type in a number; it would then create an 'empty' file of that many MB.

Of course being 14 yr old little shits, we wondered, how big can the file be? Someone created a file big enough that first it filled the student partition; then the teacher partition; then the temp partition; then the system partition, at which point the entire network slowed to a transfer speed of a couple of bytes. When we realised we could do this, it was happening several times a week.

After that, anyone caught with a blank screen and flashing cursor got in deep shit. They deleted the attrib command so we couldn't un-read-only / un-hidden things, but we just copied it from our own DOS at home and brought it in on a floppy drive