What is a TSR good for?

Over dinner a few nights ago, we visited with new friends and had a great time telling old stories from our lives. Our new friends are an interesting couple who share a lot of interests with Landi and me. The husband works in Information Tech. This of course, led to shop talk. Shop talk leads to old, and some times funny stories.

I shared a story from 30 years ago when I worked for a programming house in Memphis. I was a programmer. I was paid by commission, and commission only. Through a sequence of events, I became aware that the company I was working for was screwing me out of commissions. The lady who owned the place was who was driving it, and I really had little power to work with in terms of dealing with the situation. I decided that a psych-ops gig was called for while I looked for a new job.

This was in the days before Microsoft Windows. The operating system was Microsoft’s MS-DOS. It was a character based, single user operating system, very simple by today’s standards, very, very simple. MS-DOS was a single tasking operating system. This means it did one thing at a time…until a utility named print.com was developed. Print.com was the worlds first TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program. When you ran it, it ‘stayed in memory’ and would do work when ‘called’, sort of like a background task. A friend and I reverse engineered it for fun. It was pretty neat trick, this ‘Terminate and Stay Resident’ thing.

I took the guts of my ‘TSR’ program and used it as the basis for a program that, at random intervals, would flash in GIANT LETTERS the word ‘BITCH’ on the screen, and then restore the screen to what it had previously been showing. “BITCH” would just be there for less than 1/4 of a second, just the flash of an eye. If you blinked, you missed it. If you weren’t looking at the monitor when it hit, you would miss it. Even if you saw it, it appeared and disappeared so quickly that you weren’t really sure you actually saw it. The next time Judy had me pull maintenance on her laptop, I dropped this baby into her config.sys file and waited.

It was probably a week before a piercing scream shattered the silence in the quiet office. It came from Judy’s office. About 25 people worked at this place, and we all sprinted to Judy’s office. She was sitting there pale as a sheet and wide-eyed.

“My computer just called me a bitch”, she said and then she described what happened.

“It just flashed it at me!”

I was standing near the back enjoying this. Everyone expressed concern and asked questions, but no one know what had happened. Everyone knew Judy was a bitch, and now perhaps she was a little nuts too.

For the next 3 or 4 months, every now and then, you’d hear a scream ring out across the office and you would know what had just happened. No one else ever saw the computer do it, so everyone was starting to suspect Judy was a little nuts. This was getting to her. When another programmer and I talked to her about it, she got very irritated and became upset saying that we ‘didn’t believe her’.

Finally, one day she walked into the office and put a box on my desk. It was a new Toshiba laptop. Toshiba made the best laptops back then.

“Put all my software on this”, she ordered as she walked away.

I did. I put all of it on there.

About a week later, I finally found a new job and left. I didn’t get to hear the next scream.

She screwed me out of my outstanding commissions, but I knew that was coming. I took some perhaps misguided comfort in the thought that every now and then, the computer would remind her of what she had become. Like Dorian Grey’s portrait, the truth in what she saw did not agree with her.

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