Back in the day, it was popular to use line printers to print out large (multiple sheets taped together) ASCII images to hang on walls and such. Some of these were very popular with us guys (keep in mind this was a heavily male-centric CS-era, even worse than now) and were NSFW -- but still ended up hanging in various places where they really shouldn't have been.
At the ARPANET site #1 lab at UCLA, we wanted some "Star Wars" posters. At the time, the only place I knew of with a potentially usable video digitizer (black and white, very low resolution by today's standards of course) was at the original Stanford AI Lab (SAIL / SU-AI).
So. A nationwide TV Star Wars special was coming up. This was my chance. I arranged with the gentleman who had the digitizer at SAIL to have it tuned to the appropriate local channel in Stanford at the correct time.
Then, from my bedroom here in L.A., over the ARPANET via my account on the SAIL / SU-AI system that controlled the digitizer, I grabbed various key images as I watched the same program locally.
Then, after the program was done, I FTP'd (file transferred) those files down to UCLA, where I had a UNIX program to create those ASCII posters.
Mission accomplished, thanks to the Defense Department's ARPANET!
Though this was fun stuff, a LOT was being learned about distributed systems and resources through these kinds of amusements.
