I might have told this tale before here on the Zone…

This was back in, oh, 1987, or so. There were a few of us at the college doing database work on the mineral and fossil collections. I was leading the minerals group and this other guy, with his own computer, was doing the fossils.

The database program would let you set both foreground and background colors. There was no mouse, so everything was key stoke menus.

One night, I decided to mess with the color scheme on the other guy’s computer. I set the colors to something garish. He changed them back the next morning. I kept this up, every now and then, just for laughs.

Then, with a too quick hitting of enter, I gave his program a black background with black text.

“Oh shit”

Good thing I’d done this so many times that I had the key stroke sequence pretty much memorized and I could fix it without seeing the screen.

Scared the hell outta me for a few minutes, though.