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HISTORY

A brief history of the doomfile           November 2, 1994

The doomfile was originally conceived    
(in the late 80s) as an attempt at           The node that was
writing a hypertext implemented only         originally at the
as a plain text file.                        top of the file has
                                             since been renamed
It was intended to push the limits of        DESPERATE.
what I'd seen done with a genre that                              
might be called the "File Without Read                            
Protection".  Back then there was one                             
main Unix system at Stanford that all                             
Stanford types had access to.  These                              
people were the intended audience.                                

The intended viewer for
the doomfile was Emacs.
The long distance
hypertext jumps were
intended to be done just
by doing text searches
on keywords indicated in        I forced searches to be 
uppercase.                      case-sensitive with some
                                codes at the bottom of          
                                the file.               
                                                                
                                             Specifically, these codes:

You may still see some archaic		     Local Variables:
references to those days here in             mode:picture
this new edition of the doomfile.            truncate-lines:non-nil
Someday I'll probably strip them             case-fold-search:nil
all out.                                     next-screen-context-lines:2
                                             End:
All of this explains why I
once felt the need to write                         I used to think
an emacs tutorial...                                this was a really
                                                    neat trick.  Too bad
           EMACS                                    it's a security hole       
                                                    (similar to the problem 
                                                    with MS Offal macro 
                                                    viruses).       
							   
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