WynApse

In relating the last post to someone (another productivity enhancer this exercise fosters), I was reminded of a similar exercise I went through 'back in the day' at either Sperry or Honeywell, I don't remember which version of the company it was at the time. I was at a point in my career that I was learning Windows programming, and they were trying to figure out where to put me. So I found myself in 'Desktop Support' for a while.

This was about the time that Viasoft almost imploded by having some governing agent come in on a Friday afternoon and telling everyone to "Step away from the keyboard". Needless to say, they got spanked for all the no-license issues and then everyone else was running scared.

The Honeywell (let's assume it was Honeywell by then) managers needed jobs for their highschool kids during the summer, so they got some software that the kids could run on everyone's machine that would tell them what software they might be running on this big list of something like 250 programs.

Being in Desktop Support, I got a copy of the program a couple days early... not sure how I did that. I looked at the list and the batch file that ran and realized it was really, REALLY stupid... if you had AutoCad on your machine and you renamed it xAutoCad, the program wouldn't find it. Nowadays, I'd use the registry to find this stuff, but then it was just a raw name search.

So I dumped the list-o-bad-stuff into a dothis.bat file, then I went waaaay out on some multi-folder-deep folder structure and made a new folder into which I inserted a zero-byte file of some name. Then with my editor, I massaged the list in dothis.bat to copy the zero byte file into the target name once for all 250 programs. Then I ran dothis.bat.

I was also pretty heavily involved in device drivers and the BIOS in those days and had a device driver that I could configure hotkeys with. So I setup a hotkey that ran a small assembly file that nuked the folder.

Then I went back to work and waited.

After a couple days, a little girl came in and asked me to move away from the computer so she could check it for unapproved software. I let her run it, and the screen just scrolled and scrolled with file names. Her eyes got bigger and bigger as it progressed, and when it was done she said "I have to report this" I leaned forward and hit the hotkey as I moved the keyboard, which didn't do anything obvious on the screen as I looked at her and said "really.. why... wasn't that just the list of what you're searching for?" She said no... that was what it found. I asked her to run it again, to double-check and of course there was nothing to report.

That set up a couple hours of entertainment watching people with very little computer savvy pouring through that poor old 286 trying to find all that illegal software. The end result being they assumed there was something wrong with the testing software, and I can't remember if they continued the testing after that or not!

Productivity indeed :)