Well, Phil I'd be one that remembers CTRL H. I used it before DOS. Digital Equipment Corps family of DEC 10 mainframes circa 1978 to 1983 used an OS called TOPS 10. This was actually almost the same DOS that Bill Gates used several years later on his early and subsequent releases of MS DOS. I think this is why Bill Gates is called an entrepreneur and not a programmer.

And that CRTL H thing you have in this song wouldn't have anything to do with the rule changes on sexual explict material would it now?

By the way nice parody. I put one of these out on Sleigh Ride myself today then I read that rule change on the message board. I was pleased that mine was posted. I think I know where CG's fine line is on this.

very funny, Phil

Control-H refers to an ASCII character, and was never tied to a particular OS, so Control-H would have worked on Unix boxes before Digital Equipment even came along. MS-DOS before version 2.X was based on a clone of Digital Research's CP/M, which was loosly based on Unix.

This is true that it is an ASCII character Chuck and it still works if you are in a command prompt screen. I used to use it and other CRTL CHAR ASCII values that would do a crude type of animation on the DECSystem10 whenever PIP was used to display a monitor. You just had to use the correct sequence of CTRL characters to make whatever you wanted to 'move' happen. Is Digital still operating up there in Maynard? I was up there once a long time ago for some training on one of their new mainframes.

Very good job, Phil!!

If you're interested, I'm selling all-fives ratings, complete with a Christmas candy cane. How much would you pay for this? But wait! If you act now, you'll also get...

Great send-up of holiday-hype. 5's

DEC got bought out by someone who then got bought out by someone else... I know several of the branches have closed or been sold off and then closed, etc. So no, DEC is pretty much gone now. Most companies in the tech industry disappear so quickly, it's hard to even keep track anymore.

Help. I'm utterly swamped with all of this nerdish leetspeak jargon. Cleverly themed and written parody.

(ABC) I second the "lost in the netspeak." Great parody, anyway.

(ABC05) That DOS line ruined your first verse. Pretty good song, though.

(ABC05) Good one.

er... could I just point out that old DOS commands could in no way be counted as "netspeak" - we're talking at least ten years pre-Net ;-) But it only came up 'cause I wanted to "delete" a line. You can sing along to either version :-)

(ABC) See above.

(ABC-C) See above.

C - I LOVE the last verse!

(ABC) Merry Christmas, Phil!!...What?.....April?? You're kidding....:-) 555

Nice use of DOS commands.

(ABC) Greeat stuff :-)

Windows is overrated. Just a matter of time before DOS makes it's comeback.