From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!esquire!psl Newsgroups: net.games.emp Title: Re: Watch out for date set wrong!!!!! Article-I.D.: esquire.358 Posted: Mon May 31 01:33:14 1982 Received: Mon May 31 05:20:16 1982 Unfortunately there are problems with trying to make the program too "smart", too. E.g. if I made it say "clock set wrong!" and dump you out when it sees that your last log in was "after" the current time then all you'd need is to have the same error the other way (i.e. Mortimer Snerd brings up the system and tells it that it's 1983) and you log in happy as a clam with lots of BTUs and then someone fixes the time and you can't log in for another year... No, I couldn't make it clever enough to catch that because is might only be off by a month and you don't want to be dumped out because you haven't played for a month either... Interactive Systems once got very "smart" in the tty driver and suppressed sending out any carriage returns when your cursor was known to be in the first column already. This probably saved five or six character transmissions a day on our system. Then one day we got an Olympia Electronic Typewriter hooked up to the system and it worked fine except it wouldn't double or triple space... Sure enough, the Oly was ignoringand doing carriage return and line feed on receipt of . I spent two weeks (off & on) wondering what kind of lemon they had sent us. I'd much rather have something go wrong in an obvious way when the circumstances are obviously weird than have a "smart" system handle one or two weird cases well and then blow up for "no reason" when everything should be copacetic. What? Me defensive? Peter (esquire!psl)