>Regarding the sound of program execution: In the era of
>minicomputers, you could hear it through a suitably tuned
>radio receiver placed near the machine. I've heard
>that some people could interpret the sounds and would
>know what their program was doing at the moment. This
>could in fact help debugging in certain cases.

Funny you mention that.  I was recently using Linux to download a CD image
(of a new Linux distribution - so, back off RIAA!) using the ftp command,
which provides no progress feedback - and in such a large image the danger
of hanging is pretty bad.  It turned out, however, that if I turned up the
volume on the speakers to maximum, I could pick up interference from the
machine, including activity on the network adapter and access to the hard
drive, so I was able to do other things while listening to the download
progress.

Back to the old days, I recall people playing music through AM radios with
finely tuned loops.  People also used to play music with the relay used in
the cassette interfaces on TRS-80s.

Stephenson is not extrapolating too much - the ability to remotely capture
the video signal to a computer monitor is possible now, and I would expect
at least a couple of agencies can pick up and make sense of the rest of the
RF noise.

The goofy colors of the Squeak interface will probably make them think
something's amiss.

-- Duane