$find

Alice enters her bedroom closet. She opens the small trapdoor on the ceiling and drops the ladder through the hatch. Placing one hand on each side of the ladder, she begins slowly climbing into her attic.

She notices several things on first glance – a bunch of old cardboard boxes, a small light from the sun outside, and cobwebs as far as the eye can see. After crawling onto the attic floor, she notices a bright blue box on the floor, in front of the window.

She stands up, bumping her head on the slanted roof as she walks towards the box. Lifting the flaps out, she sees 2 pieces of styrofoam packaging and rotted packing tape. She carefully removes the styrofoam, attempting not to destroy it in her hands, and notices a beige box within.

Lifting the machine out, a keyboard and cathode display are revealed. She gives up on lifting it, as it’s far too heavy, and instead calls her sister upstairs to help.

Alice’s sister returns with a kitchen chair, and Alice gently slides the box down to her. Her sister places the box on the chair, then maneuvers it onto the floor.

The two sisters plug the terminal into a wall in the spare room, setting it on an unused, somewhat rotten, dust-covered desk. Predictably, it displays a test pattern, then does nothing.

Alice’s sister grimaces. When she was a student in university, she had used a very similar machine to complete programming assignments for her doctorate in computer science. Years ago now, these individual terminals were replaced with individual microcomputers. The new chips were blazing fast, and frankly obsoleted the old frames.

She remembers that years ago, after an accident, she was stuck at home recovering for several weeks. A friend gave her a modem, so that she could connect to the university’s mainframe over the telephone. Given the sheer look of disappointment in Alice’s eyes, her sister sister began the climb back into the attic to go find it.

Eventually, she produced a small black box lined with cheap woodgrain. A small red switch on the front was set to the “off” position. After some wiring wizardry, Alice’s sister had connected the modem to the telephone.

Dialing the mainframe’s phone number, she immediately notices an unfamiliar login prompt displayed in green text on the terminal’s cathode display. She sits down, typing her old username and password. To her surprise, she’s greeted with a shell.

“Hm.” she says half to herself. “I thought they’d gotten rid of this thing…”

“Let me go find… hm…” she thinks to herself. “Did I ever teach you how to use UNIX?”

“I don’t think so.” Alice responds. “You only taught me DOS.”

“Hm, I need to fix that.” she says. “For now, play around, I suppose. Just don’t type ‘rm’ or ‘cat’.”

“What do those do?” Alice asks.

“Bad things.” her sister answers. “I’m going to go make dinner.”

She closes the spare room’s door and Alice immediately runs ‘rm’.

rm: missing operand
Try 'rm --help' for more information.

With no idea what this means, she runs ‘cat’. It takes the ‘$’ away, but nothing else seems to happen. That is, until she presses ‘enter’ after mashing a bunch of keys. It responds with exactly what she wrote. Naturally, as a teenager, she wrote the string “i am a poopie fart head” into the interpreter, which immediately reponded with exactly that. Chuckling to herself, she tried to figure out how to get out.

Eventually, she presses Ctrl-D and is greeted with the ‘$’ again. She smiles, and types ‘help’ into the terminal. If it’s anything like DOS, it’ll present a lovely menu with a list of topics and a tutorial on how to use it.

help: command not found

Determining that the system is helpless, she flips the switch on the front of the box and gently rests her head on the black, clacky keys of the terminal’s keyboard.