Garrett: Implementing UEFI Boot to Zork

Lo, in the year nineteen hundred and eighty-four, I was at the College for Juniors in St Petersburg, Florida, and I was helping the wizards there -- some of whom had the appropriate facial hair -- to work on our recently acquired AT&T 3b2/500 computers.

We were trying to reinstall All The Good Bits on one machine which had crashed unceremoniously to the ground, and we realized that at a specific point in the (floppy-based) install, we needed to drop to a shell, and we couldn't.

So we called the AT&T TAC. They were hirsute men on the other end of that phone line, as well, and had given us much good advice in the past, and we were in hopes that this habit would continue.

And verily did we tell the wizard of our plight, and did he walk us through the floppy boot procedure, until again, we reached the prompt:

[1 2 3 help quit]:

"Type 'MAGIC MODE'", spake the wizard.

Once we had picked ourselves up off the floor, dusted ourselves off, and stopped laughing (in that order), we typed what the wizard had instructed us, and hit ENTER.

[1 2 3 help shell quit]: shell
#

"Sonuvabitch", saith we all.

In an amusedly self-important voice, the wizard asked if we'd be needing anything else, and we all agreed that no, we were pretty sure we could carry on from there.

I eventually dug through the bootscripts on the floppy to the point where that happened, and there was a smartass comment there too, but it was 29 years ago, and I don't remember it anymore. I almost certainly posted on Usenet about it, so unless DejaGoo has melted all the way into slag, you could look it up. :-)