The other kind of “flash” that we used to worry about

I was reading an article the other day and it took me a moment to realize that it was talking about flash as in software and not about flash as in flash storage. Based on the headline I thought Rachel would write about the same, so I was quite surprised and amused to read that she was talking about an even older meaning of flash.

&gt; I should mention that there have been many variants on this theme. You could jam those same fun escape sequences into a mail<p>This happened to me once as an undergraduate. I was in a lab full of dying Suns (they were replaced the following semester). It was late at night, late in the term and the hushed lab was packed with students wrapping up their projects. I used Pine to open an e-mail from one of my friends at another university, which turned out to be an animated Christmas tree, complete with blinking lights and beeping out &quot;We Wish You a Merry Christmas&quot; on the internal speaker. I killed the terminal window as fast as I could, which wasn&#x27;t very fast because the poor Sun was so busy rendering it. Everybody gave me dirty looks.

This is still possible at CMU. Guaranteed to annoy your friends doing their homework.<p>mesg y is the default and write works. However when you try to run wall you get &quot;-bash: &#x2F;usr&#x2F;bin&#x2F;wall: Permission denied.&quot;

I knew about talkd and other shenanigans but I have never heard it called “getting flashed” before

Sometimes I think this happens to me when I accidentally `cat` binary files! It&#x27;s particularly interesting that people used to add such strange features as &quot;automatic file transfer&quot; to their terminals.

You can often find escape sequences embedded in requests in web server log files, waiting for some unsuspecting user with a vulnerable terminal to read them.

Simpler times... I remember when running talkd, fingerd, etc. was the norm. Not to mention unshadowed password files.

&quot;Flash&quot; is also a term of art in manufacturing, where it&#x27;s the excess material squeezed out along the mold lines where the molds join.