Doom interface for System Administration?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers,,,781-647-1813)]

Chuck Young <cyoung at bbnplanet.COM> writes:

	http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

	Tired of listing your processes and killing them by PID?

	I just glanced at this from one of our internal mailing lists and got a
	laugh out of it.  It should be construed as humor, but apparently it
	builds too...

There is precedent for this approach.  Over 10 years  ago,  I  saw  a
version  of  the game Hack in which you might be spproached by a Mail
Daemon, which handed you a Scroll of Mail.   It  was,  of  course,  a
newly-arrived  email  message.   In  a subsequent release, the daemon
would hang around in case you wanted to give is a  Scroll  of  Reply,
which  it would carry off.  You could also dismiss the daemon, if you
had no reply, and you could deposit the scroll in a trash bin if  you
wished.  It was fairly well done. The main limitation was that if you
just wanted to send a message, you had  to  go  hunting  for  a  Mail
Daemon.  Typing a "mail" command was a lot faster.

In general, there's no inherent reason for not  using  this  sort  of
model for a UI.  The only problem is the psychological one: What will
the boss think?  But all this does is exclude from consideration what
might  actually  be  a very practical approach, with a bit of testing
and development with real users and admins in the loop.

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