By comparison, 'What's your sign?' would be cool
It's the late 1980s, and this young, single IT pilot fish is working for a company where the computing mainstays are Wang minicomputers.
"There was a cute girl who worked in one of the other buildings," says fish. "So, using my godlike admin powers, I sent a text message to her terminal to ask her out for lunch. I figured it was a safe and discreet way to communicate.
"On Wang terminals, such messages caused the whole screen to switch from the user's application to a system-settings screen, with room for a single line of text buried in the middle of all the system prompts and options.
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