When I was at Stanford in the early '80s, undergraduate computing was centered around the Low-Overhead Timesharing System, or LOTS. This facility had two DECSystem-20s (described by Geoff Pullum as "Like a computer, but bigger and noisier") and dozens of text-only terminals that you actually had to go to the computer center to use. There was minimal actual staff, the bulk of the running of the place done by volunteer student consultants, who traded consulting time for "allocation" (time on the machine). This was back when "hacking" was a good word, and that's what we did.
Anyway, once a quarter, when the projects were coming due and everybody was pulling all-nighters, some people would hold a concert of filksongs about the center and hacking and such. Some of them are quite good, and many capture the "feel" of the era quite well. Before I graduated, I (must have) made a copy of the song collection, and it seems like the sort of thing that should be made available, out of historical interest.
One of the places I waste far too much time is the alt.usage.english Usenet newsgroup. One of the wonderful things about the net is that it makes it easy for people from all over the world to converse, and on newsgroup devoted to language, it was inevitable that many of the threads would be about the different ways people pronounce words. Unfortunately, such things are hard to get across in a textual medium, as you can only describe the pronunciation of words with respect to the pronunciation of other words. This, of course, leads to lots of talking past one another, amusing at first, but quickly becoming tiring. Fortunately, linguists long ago developed a system for specifying in print just what sounds they mean: the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Unfortunately, it uses a lot of characters that couldn't (and still can't) easily be typed or communicated in Usenet messages.
So in 1992, a bunch of us on alt.usage.english and sci.lang got together and came up with a de facto standard way of writing IPA using only the ASCII characters that can be assumed to work in mail and news, and in a way that renders the result writable and readable with very little practice. This was meant as a stopgap until the full Unicode character set (which includes IPA) became usable. We're still waiting, and the transcription has worked pretty well in the meanwhile.