TTE: Terminal Text Effects

A few years ago, a submarine cable was knocked out, between our startup's MVP servers in Singapore AWS, and our networked factory stations in Asia.

In lieu of the submarine cable, something closer to a wet string was being routed over. It had such high latency and packet loss, that a watchdog timer I'd implemented on the stations was timing out.

Fortunately, the remote access we'd built into our stations (SSH and OpenVPN) still worked, albeit at slow speeds, like a 300 baud dialup, and crazy-high latency.

Having occasionally dealt with performance a bit like that as a kid, and knowing my way around Linux, it was like "I've been training my whole life for this moment."

So I just flexed the old command-line-and-editor-when-you-feel-every-byte-transmitted skill, and got the stations working, before the factory even knew about the submarine cable, saving our infinite-9s uptime.

It was nothing compared to what NASA does, but terminal animation effects would've ended both of our missions.

Wow - this is very cool and gives me strong nostalgia for Commodore-64/128 demos and old-school BBS's. I remember spending hours on my Commodore 64 doing this sort of thing by hand for the little BBS that I ran out of my bedroom.

No "The Matrix" effect? That was one of the earliest programs I wrote back in 2000, and I was so proud of myself.

Awesome! Someone please use this in a film or TV show.

Now this is the kind of stuff I want to see more of on HN. Really cool!