Good Morning, Dave: the 1998 INET Conference Kiosk Launcher

In July 1998, the Internet Society held INET ‘98, “The Internet Summit”, at Palexpo in Geneva. The University of Geneva provided about 250 computers for the conference, and I was a student there. I wrote much of the conference network’s website, www.inet98.ch, and the launcher that ran on the public Windows 95 PCs instead of Explorer. The Inet 98 Launcher was a full-height bar on the left of the screen with a button for each installed application: Internet Explorer, Netscape, PC Pine, Telnet, WS-FTP and Office 95 and 97. I wrote it in Delphi 3. It showed a screen saver when a machine sat idle, reset itself, and could reboot the PC to return it to a clean state. It also had a remote-control server on TCP port 895. Staff could connect from anywhere on the network, type a password and send a message to a user, hide the bar, start the screen saver, or reboot the machine. A wrong password got “alarm has been activated, you are logged!”. The right one got “Good morning dave!”. This is the…