I heard from Mike Cowlishaw about the IBM jargon items "branch to Fishkill" and "branch to Owego"They reflect a set of site pairs within IBM in which one site designed and made hardware (Fishkill, Owego) and another site designs and builds software (Kingston, Endicott). To the software folks the hardware world was esoteric and weird, hence the branch targets for weirdness were the hardware sites.On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 12:15 PM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:Mike is an old friend ... I will send him a copy of "Bringing a Chainsaw" and ask ... I don't think he was in Yorktown at the time but I probably told him about the work while it was happening.On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 11:56 AM Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> wrote:John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> writes:
> Some editions of the Jargon File contain an entry for _branch to
> Fishkill_, defined as "Any unexpected jump in a program that produces
> catastrophic or just plain weird results" and attributed to IBM.
Mike Cowlishaw's IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary, Tenth
Edition <http://www.comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf> was probably the source for
this -- it includes both "branch to Fishkill" and "branch to Owego" with
exactly this definition.
--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>