programmers: how would you figure out a completely unknown computer? Assume that all you have is a keyboard and a screen and a command prompt, and that typed unicode characters show up on screen
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Depends on what you mean by figure out. What do you have in mind?
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learn to talk to it and eventually program it
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I do this, and work with a team of folks who do something like this on the reg. It’s very much like learning an unknown language. You find some Rosetta Stone that gives you a little bit of it and work from they by guess and check until you can build a grammar.
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ill try the following commands
> help
> 1 + 1
> ?
> whoami
> hostname
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I'd start by figuring out who it was built for. If it was built for humans like me, there's a good chance there's some language on earth it understands, so I'd probably try different variations of "help" in different languages
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Unicode tty goes a long way to instilling confidence.
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Look for a phone # so I could yell at tech support. Though first I would have a need to do something with it. What's my problem? Doing taxes? Unlikely in this scenario. I would just mash buttons and document the results. Find patterns I could look up on Stack Overflow.
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Reboot, try to glean something from the boot output. (And then commence traversal of whatever infospaces, physical or virtual, are available..)
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"wut" works as an opener.
If you don't get some kind of error:
Run. Away.








