Title : Telnet Song Original : ? Group : ? Author : Guy L. Steele / D.E. Knuth Intro : D.E. Knuth, 'The Complexity of Songs', Communications of the ACM 27 (4) pp. 345--348, April, 1984 (repetitions indicated; the song is only sung correctly if the appropriate number of repetitions is used) Some comments: Strictly speaking, the song is not part of the article; it was appended afterwards. The composer and lyricist is Guy L. Steele, Jr. The melody has a certain haunting quality that is quite hard to convey in ASCII text. I don't know whether it has ever been played. The composer has email, so it shouldn't be too hard to find out. Song : There is a program called TELNET to get to another CPU. Control up-arrow is the escape; it's doubled to send it through, and "quit" is control up-arrow Q. A hacker once used TELNET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type control up-arrow Q. Instead the hacker used TEL-NET to get to another CPU. He knew he could quit whenever he wanted to: all he had to do was type control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^i times] Q. [repeat verse n times; the choice of n is free] The hacker soon got bored with this, and wanted to get back. He sighed, and started the exponential popping of the stack: The hacked flushed the TEL-NET to the most distant CPU: He couldn't log out until he had killed them all, counting up powers of two: he typed control up-arrow [at i-th time, repeat 2^(n-i+1) times] Q. [repeat n times] Whew! The hacker's eyes were bloodshot; his fingers, black and blue; He wanted to log out and and go home to bed, and sleep for a day or two. He typed L O G O U T ... carriage return ... The hacker was on a network with only twenty CPU's. But if he had telnetted to them all, he would not yet be through with typing control up-arrow [repeat 7 times] Q! @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@