RWALL (Remote Write to All) - Computerphile 

Hi Julian! The message I sent to everyone (and I'm quoting from very distant memory here, so it may not be word-for-word accurate) was: "This is a test of area coverage. If you get this, please send your nasty, indignant flames to jkh@violet.berkeley.edu". Yes, the text was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but that was the culture at the time and I expected to get such replies ONLY from people at U.C. Berkeley, almost all of whom in the various computer departments knew me personally, so I figured they'd just laugh and send me an email with "Got it, you *&^%$#@! HOW DID YOU DO THAT??" or they wouldn't get anything at all since I didn't expect it to actually WORK. Needless to say, I got a lot of nasty, indignant flames that day from people who did NOT know me, which is why I sent the personal replies. I did not, however, get a personal message from Dennis Perry (the inspector general of the ARPANET) even though he got scribbled on, something I am both grateful and a little sad about - it would have been a message to save! For awhile, I also held the dubious distinction of "the internet's first spammer" and got an honorable mention in the 1989 "International SPAM Olympics", but sadly no modern records of this exist.

People got ONE spam message and were massively annoyed by it 😂

"Hello World!" would have been an appropriate message

Funny how "remote", "write", and "all" just sound dangerous now, even on their own

Remember doing `net send * hello` on a Windows LAN about 20 years ago. Chaos ensued - I did not think in a million years it would work.

Love stories like this!

"wall" is the ancestor of "@everyone" on Discord

I sure love listening to the pioneers talk about old times even though I grew up in the runescape days. Invaluable information.

We used "write" all the time in our CS lab to mess with our friends. That, and "eject". Both commands got banned by senior year because things got out of hand

I used to wall pranks like "this system has been hacked". Very few knew the Unix systems they were working on. Most of the techs there just had to run a few scrips to test our cards & such. NOT that I was a guru or anything, especially at that time. But I always felt that C & Unix are KING.

This makes me feel better about the time I sent a sarcastic response to a professor's email using BSD's 'mail'. Yep, the default was "Reply All" ...

I Appreciate these Memories, Literally and LITERALLY.

I heard a story from guy who used to teach IT to soldiers back in the windows XP days: A few of the more knowledgeable soldiers were using NET SEND from the command line to secretly chat in class. One of them forgot to include their buddy's computer name in a message and it was broadcast on all computers in the lab. The teacher quickly figured out what they had been doing and said "You just broadcast this to the entire base, maybe even the entire Army!" After class, the soldier was presented with multiple NCOs and officers of ever-increasing rank (up to Major, IIRC) telling him stories of how his message had popped up all over the base and country and affected ongoing operations. They then told him the truth and let him go with a warning to stop chatting in class.

My employer was mainly a VAX/VMS shop back in the day. I remember when the PHONE program made an appearance, and was a novelty for all of ten minutes. Then everybody made sure to add SET BROADCAST/NOPHONE in their login scripts ...

11:21 The Elders of the Internet 😅

I worked for a company of 10,000 employees back in the 90's, a Windows NT shop. I discovered the windows "net send" command. The entire building ricochet to the sound of floors of workstations lighting up. They soon switched that off in the default policy.

Tell everyone on the 'net, "Shall we play a game?"

My story is me in high school in the late 90s on the school computers I discovered a command called netsend I think it was called followed by something like -all. I told someone and they did it with a rude message not realizing everyone knew exactly who it came from so a minute later someone came to the classroom and plucked them out lol

Reminds me of the time my friends and I in school discovered that you can programatically send emails through google drives script feature and we put a "send to entire student body" in for loop that ran a couple thousand times LMAO. IT was very unhappy with us, but thankfully it was easy for them to clear up the issue so we didn't get into to much trouble.

When I was doing remote tech support for customers' servers, the fastest way to get me to *not* work on your issue was to bypass the ticket system and use wall(1) to communicate.

Funny story - a fellow student once send me a message on one of our HPC nodes.. I had a program running via MPI across the Cluster while his message slipped in between the stdout from mpi.. my ssh client intepreted the EOF of the message as EOF of the shell and terminated the whole connection 😂😂 as the program had no resume functionality I had to start over again 🙄

Over 20 years ago I sent Happy Easter via SMS to everyone on the E+ mobile net because their Windows SMS app erroneously allowed for it. It was even in the local news for I think some 17.000 people received it. Then again you can easily write to that many peoply today on reddit or in some facebook groups.

0:55 I remember Prof. Eric Foxley! I still have my printout of his C programming course from 1992.

Great story Julian! Enjoyed it!!

Ah yeah, we used to 'talk' to each other a lot back at my Alma mater :) good times... buddy got wall'd once for this command 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/null' :D

Yep I remember talk and it was one to one. I extended it to be multi-user (in 1985) when I was supposed to be learning something that was probably less interesting. I think my version of mtalk (as I named it) has been lost to history.

Unless the messaging is opt-in then even something like "write" sounds bad. You could just use the "who" command featured at the start of the video along with a script to mirror the behavior of "wall", run that in a second loop and you're now spamming everyone.

anyone remember NET SEND on windows 98? probably was similar to this.

Oh, what fun. :) I haven't used the wall command in ages but I did use it to alert users of a system shutdown or reboot. I just checked my machine and rwall isn't installed but there is an rwall package available.

I remember issuing remote shutdown commands in high school.

Learnt a lot about the internet as a newb from a benign 'talk' friend popping in from 'nowhere' in the 90s 😊

I used to use write, rtalk, etc. It was the first form of online instant messaging. It was how I first heard about Linux too.

so inspiring, so beautiful.. and oh so informative

When people don't read the docs: Build that wall! Build that wall!

Had no clue about some of the commands in this video e.g. 'who' and 'w'. Great stuff!

Computerphile really needs to start adding captions, don't y'all listen to tom scott haha

Terminal Room. Scary!

The who results at 1:25 put up some names I recall from when I was at Rutland Hall studying maths and physics in the late 1970s.

Do a video featuring another channel explaining why information can't travel faster than light theoretically, and what holes in our reality would appear if information was able to be instantaneous

Wonder if this command was on Zuckerberg's mind when he (or whoever) coded the wall

Around that same time, my high school's computer class was a room with an IBM System/360 and 8 terminals (plus one PC) connected to it. There was a similar command to write to any other terminal, and the "bell" was a super-loud mechanical buzzer (more of a clatterer) in the keyboard. We would have fun annoying one another with this, but then someone discovered that if you were on the Console (terminal 2), you could send to all. And they'd all go off at roughly the same time…

To the windows to the rwall....

Now for a breakdown of photon quantum computing

rwall sounds like it could actually be useful for emergency broadcasts, like for natural disasters. Maybe limited by area, guessed by IP.

I used talk and ytalk quite a lot back in the late 80s/early 90s.

Lovely. Just checked my current RaspberryPiOS and the who and w commands still work! rwall not found though,

zsh: command not found: rwall :(

how would write something that connected to everyone on the internet nowadays from the terminal i wonder

The time before e-marketing... just imagine how many emails went around on (the days preceding) black Friday. Billions.

Was expecting something much worse. How nice it would be that the worst you'd get from the internet was a random annoying mesage.

Nothing changes. "This is yor folt." - or some more recent similar things....

What I'm wondering is, how does this work when someone is actively working in the Terminal? Does the message wait until they finish typing something, or are they immediately interuppted?

The rwall message wouldn't have been accepted by every computer on the internet. It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone on the internet received it.

9:54 First occurence of SPAM?

How does that did not interfere with a e.g. running vim?

*Me reading the thumbnail title* rwall er mi ot te e?

hey.... apt-get install rwalld :)

Oh yes no security and able to remotely write to someone's sound device ;)

rsync my fav command , comment your fav one 👇🏻

Nice socks

ah yes the time when you could call up sun and demand them to patch away the client for the insecure server :'D

confused at the amount of comments. way too little

Yh

I'll send an SMS to the world / I'll send an SMS to the world / I hope everyone gets my / I hope everyone gets my / Message in an RWALL

Talk about write and wall, but not of talk??

Wait did he said SSH is not secure? Why?

Next video topic: Noice Reduction....

Literally no one: Samsung: 1

Third!

i remember talk, but not write and certainly not a wall to the entire internet

awwwwwwww. I wanna beable to do this!!!

First! Edit: Second. Fml