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Original song |
Unknown |
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Original artist |
Unknown |
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Filk author |
Guy L. Steele / D.E. Knuth |
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Intro |
D.E. Knuth, 'The Complexity of Songs', Communications of the ACM 27 (4) pp. 345--348, April, 1984 (repetitions indicated; the song is only sung correctly if the appropriate number of repetitions is used) Some comments: Strictly speaking, the song is not part of the article; it was appended afterwards. The composer and lyricist is Guy L. Steele, Jr. The melody has a certain haunting quality that is quite hard to convey in ASCII text. I don't know whether it has ever been played. The composer has email, so it shouldn't be too hard to find out. |
Telnet Song
There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU.
Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through,
and "quit" is control up-arrow Q.
A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU.
He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type
control up-arrow Q.
Instead the hacker used TEL-NET to get to another CPU.
He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type
control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^i times]
Q.
[repeat verse n times; the choice of n is free]
The hacker soon got bored with this, and wanted to get back.
He sighed, and started the exponential popping of the stack:
The hacked flushed the TEL-NET to the most distant CPU:
He couldn't log out until he had killed them all,
counting up powers of two: he typed
control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^(n-i+1) times]
Q.
[repeat n times]
Whew!
The hacker's eyes were bloodshot; his fingers, black and blue;
He wanted to log out and and go home to bed, and sleep for a day or two.
He typed L O G O U T ... carriage return ...
The hacker was on a network with only twenty CPU's.
But if he had telnetted to them all,
he would not yet be through with typing
control up-arrow [repeat 7 times]
Q!
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