Anatoly Shashkin💾Any olds around? Have you ever actually used a BOSS KEY feature to hide the fact that you were playing a PC game on a company machine? Tell me.
root42@dosnostalgic we played networked bzFlag during our PhD…. It had a boss key. And we used it.
OldCoderNo, but my Linux distro includes a boss key because, why not. [See screenshot.] Actually, I think that this is referred to as a "Show Desktop" button, but I'm not sure that I see the difference.
In the 1990s, my CEO at IPT would have been outraged if he'd thought that people were sneaking game time on the sly. But I don't recall that he minded when we set up the office openly, just for a few days, so that everybody could blast away in Doom. I think that we even ran extra cables.
We must have used DOS TCP packet drivers. The details are lost to time, but I remember that it worked pretty well.
A young developer named Leon, now an aging CEO in Norway, brought his two daughters to the office for a visit. We booted up a DOS game called "Katie's Farm" for them and they apparently talked for days about picking strawberries in the game. Nobody minded that.
However, if somebody had been caught using a boss key, that would have been the end of them.
I thought of boss keys, myself, primarily as humor. Wouldn't an approaching boss see you move quickly to hit just the one key? I suppose that somebody with nerves of steel would be able to bluff their way through it.
Link to a copy of Katie's Farm:
https://tinyurl.com/katies-farm
Screenshot: Boss key in #Laclin Linux with the desktop running BEWorld, a video game that has the distinction of being written entirely in Tcl [even the music data and other assets].
#DOS #games
In the 1990s, my CEO at IPT would have been outraged if he'd thought that people were sneaking game time on the sly. But I don't recall that he minded when we set up the office openly, just for a few days, so that everybody could blast away in Doom. I think that we even ran extra cables.
We must have used DOS TCP packet drivers. The details are lost to time, but I remember that it worked pretty well.
A young developer named Leon, now an aging CEO in Norway, brought his two daughters to the office for a visit. We booted up a DOS game called "Katie's Farm" for them and they apparently talked for days about picking strawberries in the game. Nobody minded that.
However, if somebody had been caught using a boss key, that would have been the end of them.
I thought of boss keys, myself, primarily as humor. Wouldn't an approaching boss see you move quickly to hit just the one key? I suppose that somebody with nerves of steel would be able to bluff their way through it.
Link to a copy of Katie's Farm:
https://tinyurl.com/katies-farm
Screenshot: Boss key in #Laclin Linux with the desktop running BEWorld, a video game that has the distinction of being written entirely in Tcl [even the music data and other assets].
#DOS #games
