I wrote a “conversation starter” on a time sharing system back in the early 70s. It was like the cookie monster that asked for a cookie. If you left your terminal unattended someone would start this up and after a bit it would print out a message that looked like an instant message from one of the other users on the system. It was usually something like, “Thanks for the help.” or “What’s the command to …?” The kind of stuff people would tend to answer, even from a slightly unexpected source. I never expected to use it in the wild, but some friends of mine did and said it was surprisingly effective.
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