alt Hacker NewsBack in the PDP-10 days, one communicated with it using a terminal attached to it. One of my fellow students discovered that if you hit backspace enough times, the terminal handler would keep erasing characters before the buffer. Go far enough, and then there was an escape character (Ctrl-u?) that would delete the whole line.
Poof went the operating system!
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tolciho • today at 2:50 AM
control+u for line-kill is probably a recent thing, a random PDF of "The Unix Programming Environment" (Kernighan & Pike, 1984, p.6) has @ as the line-kill character (and # is erase which these days may or may not be control+? (linux often does something wrong with the delete key, unlike the *BSD)).
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That reminds me of "Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs". There's something so charming about system memory being misinterpreted.
https://blog.danielwellman.com/2008/10/real-life-tron-on-an-...