30 Nov, 2022
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[TUHS] Re: Four windowing systems on SunOS
My favorite SunView story was the day I was working in the Pentagon (I was [email redacted] for a while). One of the Sun workstations had a Sunview screen lock running and the guy I was visiting was on the phone. I told him I’d just unlock the thing myself. I promptly set forth to do so and got it open. He quickly said, “I have to hang up and go check on something,” and came over and asked how I’d done that.
The screen lock was just a very large window forced to the top of everything on the screen. If you hit the hot key to iconify it, you had a fraction of a second to interact before it reasserted itself. So you keep hitting iconify and maybe getting a letter or two typed into one of the one terminal windows at a time. You run ps, find the pid of the screen lock process, and kill it.
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