6 Aug
2014
6 Aug
'14
7:53 p.m.
While on this thread, I have to share my favorite Model 37 TYY story.
The Model 37 was a mechanical marvel--under the hood it was filled with
levers and cams and all manner of strange mechanisms. Dennis Ritchie had
one at home long after most of the rest of us had moved on to glass
teletypes. It mostly worked, although as it aged the mechanical systems
got a bit rickety and had a tendency to insert an extra blank character
into the line you were typing, especially if you were typing fast.
The last straw for Dennis happened late one evening when he was doing the
usual housekeeping after compiling a large program:
rm *.o
(after all, disc space was very limited in those days) and he got back the
message:
.o not found