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.
Craig P
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
JP@dosnostalgic the period of time i played games with a boss key and the the period of time i was of employable age did not overlap, but i do enjoy the odd window this gave me into adult life.
Andrés Hirunatan 🐌@dosnostalgic yess! Literally.
In the 90's i worked in a company with a bunch of programmer colleagues, and we used to install games in the work computers. We even used the local network to play DOOM in multiplayer mode when internet was still too slow to play online.
And yes, we used boss keys when available, or used other tricks we got to hide the game quickly when a boss was near.
StarcadeI remember the boss key, although I never used it.
It does remind me of something though.
When I first started working, and I was deploying and upgrading computers at a company, one department to my surprise were all playing the DOS version of Tetris during working hours. Noone hid that they were playing. It was roughly 15 people. And they all seemed to have these insanely high scores 🙂
Дими́трийI've used 'the wiggler' to keep my teams icon green while watching p0rn. does that count?
PJ Evans@dosnostalgic The DOS Star Wars port would bring up an operational spreadsheet if you hit Ctrl+B
Eliot Lash@dosnostalgic Sort of, as a kid I would sometimes play the hidden Word `97 pinball game in class because if you hit the ESC key it would drop you right back into Word so it looked like you were working!
Word 97 SR-1 Easter Egg - Pinball
Spindley Q Frog@Eliot_L @dosnostalgic damn I'm not sure how I went this long without learning about Word 97 Pinball when I have been finding excuses to bring up the Excel "flight simulator" in conversation for decades
@SpindleyQ @Eliot_L I think I still remember how to start both up. AND the Hall of Tortured Souls from Excel 95.
Tim McCormack@dosnostalgic Not that old. But I did use a boss key to hide games from my parents. :-)