Oh man, bugging people in pine with talk was the worst/best. Kids, it was a world in which someone could destroy your email session and spray characters all over the screen just by IM-ing you. Everyone knew how to do it, and everyone checked in on one another all the time (using who or w of course), so the odds against your completing a long email and sending it before someone wrecked your pine session were pretty long. The really hardcore kids figured out how to compose emails in pico or vi and then mail them from mail.
A year or two later everyone started using gopher and Mosaic and Eudora instead, which was obviously way more civilized.
We would figure out what /dev/tty our friends were using and echo a ^L into their VT100. I remember one friend had a whole ASCII-art picture that he would spray into a tty and really freak them out.
A year or two later everyone started using gopher and Mosaic and Eudora instead, which was obviously way more civilized.