The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 4, 2006

Official News - page 9

ON THE WEB: BOSS ALERT WEB PAGE

Early versions of games often had a "boss alert" screen - you could hit a button or type a command and the screen would instantly display a spreadsheet or some official-looking facts and figures, to disguise the fact that you were playing games when you should have been working. This was necessary in the days before multi-tasking, when computers could only run one program at a time.

Indeed, early versions of Fed had a 'PANIC' command which fired off 25 carriage returns (that being the size of screens in those days) to remove the evidence of your illicit playing from the screen when the boss came in!

Now there's a web page that does the same thing. If your browser supports tabbed browsing, just keep a tab open on this page and you can switch to it instantly. Otherwise, make sure you can paste the URL into your browser when the boss hoves in sight.

This mock spreadsheet even has buttons which work! You'll find it on the Ezpresso web site. The page uses javascript so you will need to have that enabled in your browser.


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