4 Oct
2017
4 Oct
'17
2:30 p.m.
I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page:
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
Wesley Parish
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
5 Oct
5 Oct
3:22 p.m.
Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
-Don
On 4 Oct 2017, at 10:30, Wesley Parish
<wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote:
I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page:
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
Wesley Parish
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand
Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
8:26 p.m.
At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the "The Joy of UNIX."
Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so he made
up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of
UNIX,"
etc... and handed them out. I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.
The "is a trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
Empire." At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
Trademark." I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's. AT&T's lawyers
even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.
There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
codes. My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.
A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
(Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted in
non-smoking areas. I think that was also the source of the "Cannot fork--
Try again during lunch" quote.
8:37 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the
"The Joy of UNIX."
Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so he made
up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of
UNIX,"
etc... and handed them out. I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.
The "is a trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
Empire." At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
Trademark." I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's. AT&T's lawyers
even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.
A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie, "Spaceballs" is
recurring product spots for the film's promotional materials
("Spaceballs: the toiler paper" was my favorite:
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/c3/53/c3/c353c3a52c70a66b2d7cf456756a361c--movie-…)
This sounds similar in both character and execution.
- Dan C.
9:33 p.m.
A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie,
"Spaceballs" is recurring product spots for the film's promotional
materials
From IMDB:
In a 2013 television interview (shorty before receiving the AFI Lifetime Achievement
Award), Mel Brooks stated that he personally obtained George Lucas' full permission
to parody any and all things Star Wars-related but, on one condition, that absolutely no
merchandise of any kind be produced from the film. This is the reason why all Yogurt and
the Dinks do is merchandising (it is also why none of the merchandise seen in the film was
ever mass produced or publicly sold in any way).
11:11 p.m.
"System V, consider it sub-standard"
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 8:34 AM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie,
"Spaceballs" is recurring
product spots for the film's promotional
materials
From IMDB:
In a 2013 television interview (shorty before receiving the AFI Lifetime
Achievement Award), Mel Brooks stated that he personally obtained George
Lucas' full permission to parody any and all things Star Wars-related but,
on one condition, that absolutely no merchandise of any kind be produced
from the film. This is the reason why all Yogurt and the Dinks do is
merchandising (it is also why none of the merchandise seen in the film was
ever mass produced or publicly sold in any way).
6 Oct
6 Oct
1:06 a.m.
My favorite has always been Henry Spencer's famous quote: "Those who
do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 12:11 PM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
"System V, consider it sub-standard"
On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 8:34 AM Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie,
"Spaceballs" is recurring
product spots for the film's promotional materials
From IMDB:
In a 2013 television interview (shorty before receiving the AFI Lifetime
Achievement Award), Mel Brooks stated that he personally obtained George
Lucas' full permission to parody any and all things Star Wars-related but,
on one condition, that absolutely no merchandise of any kind be produced
from the film. This is the reason why all Yogurt and the Dinks do is
merchandising (it is also why none of the merchandise seen in the film was
ever mass produced or publicly sold in any way).
6 Oct
6 Oct
5:28 a.m.
On Thu, 5 Oct 2017, Jon Steinhart wrote:
Favorite bumper sticker: "Reach out and grep
someone".
Back at university a friend lost his keys. He told a group of us in the
caffeteria that he'd grepped the house for them. It occured to me that he
went around the house picking everything up and comparing it to a known
set of keys.
Rob
7:01 a.m.
I remember:
"Version 7 was an improved on everything that preceeded it,
and everything that followed".
We regarded Sys-V as rather, well, "untidy" at the time.
-Steve
7:33 a.m.
On Oct 5, 2017, at 6:01 PM, Steve Simon
<steve(a)quintile.net> wrote:
I remember:
"Version 7 was an improved on everything that preceeded it,
and everything that followed".
A variation of C.A.R.Hoare's quip in his 1973 paper "Hints on
Programming Language Design"
The more I ponder the principles of language design, and
the techniques which put them into practice, the more is my
amazement and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so
far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement
on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.
7 Oct
7 Oct
2:51 p.m.
ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.
On 6/10/2017 1:26 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the
"The Joy of UNIX."
Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so he made
up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of
UNIX,"
etc... and handed them out. I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.
The "is a trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
Empire." At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
Trademark." I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's. AT&T's lawyers
even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.
There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
codes. My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.
A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
(Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted in
non-smoking areas. I think that was also the source of the "Cannot fork--
Try again during lunch" quote.
--
Russell Page
RussellPage(a)foxhat.net
+61 405 148 325
7:30 p.m.
While not quite a UNIX witticism, we did have a USENIX fun and game. When I was playing
university administrator at Rutgers, I had a student who decided that in order to get a
good job he needed to go to USENIX and hang out with all the high powered hackers there.
He convinced some professor to actually fund his attendance, but he wanted to make a good
impression. He got on a rather popular (non-UNIX) mailing list and asked what people
wore to the conference. He thought that he'd actually have to wear a suit. I
pointed out that it was really casual. Then Erik Fair got a hold of him and told him,
yes, you wear shorts and a t-shirt, and sandals, and they had to be Birkenstocks. So off
goes this kid in the dead of winter in New Jersey looking for Birkenstocks. I think he
finally found them.
He went out to the show and had a pretty good time hanging out. A week after we got
back he comes in sporting a new haircut. I made a polite inquiry about what was up, but
he didn't catch my drift. My then girlfriend bluntly asked him why he had a
homosexual (not the word she used) haircut. He said that all the hackers we hung out
with at the conference had that hairstyle. I had to point out to him that they were all
gay.
Never did find out what happened to that kid after graduation.
8:12 p.m.
On Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 03:22:42PM +0200, Don Hopkins wrote:
Annnnnnnd, that's the thread, noone can top that! ROTFL.
--lm
On 7 Oct 2017, at 10:51, Russell Page
<RussellPage(a)foxhat.net> wrote:
ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.
That???s at AT&T System V error code. The corresponding BSD error code is ENOWEED.
-Don 
8:21 p.m.
Russell Page <RussellPage(a)foxhat.net> wrote:
|On 6/10/2017 1:26 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
...
|> There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
|> codes. My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.
|>
|> A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
|> (Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted \
|> in
|> non-smoking areas. I think that was also the source of the "Cannot \
|> fork--
|> Try again during lunch" quote.
...
|ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.
You know, i liked that so much when i have heard this first that
the BSD Mail i maintain uses the following as a catch-all error:
?0!0/NONE[#/var/spool/mail/steffen]? echo \
$^ERR-1000: $^ERRNAME-1000: $^ERRDOC-1000
255: NOTOBACCO: Snorkeling on empty pipe
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
5 Oct
5 Oct
4:43 p.m.
I can't remember where, but I once saw "UNIX is a registered footnote of
Bell Laboratories".
On 4/10/2017 7:30 PM, Wesley Parish wrote:
I've just visited Slashdot and found this little
gem at the bottom of the page:
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
Wesley Parish
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand
Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
--
Russell Page
RussellPage(a)foxhat.net
+61 405 148 325
4:54 p.m.
The one that comes to mind is "Unix is user-friendly; it's just picky
about who its friends are."
-uso.
6 Oct
6 Oct
4:38 a.m.
On Thursday, 5 October 2017 at 21:43:36 +1100, Russell Page wrote:
I can't remember where, but I once saw "UNIX
is a registered footnote of
Bell Laboratories".
My favourite was:
UNIX is a registered trade mark of AT&T
AT&T is a modem test command.
Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog(a)lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
5 Oct
5 Oct
4:53 p.m.
Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz> writes:
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark
Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
That reminds me of this one (I don't know where I picked it up, though):
"UNIX is a registered trade mark of AT&T. AT&T is a modem test
command."
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay
6 Oct
6 Oct
10:01 p.m.
Il 04/10/2017 alle 10:30, Wesley Parish ha scritto:
Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws
in a few on the
front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
For a good start, I would suggest:
$ fortune -im unix
--
Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at:
gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/
10:48 p.m.
I loved the man page for the ching program had in BUGS: "it futhers
one to seek the great man"
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Dario Niedermann
<dario(a)darioniedermann.it> wrote:
Il 04/10/2017 alle 10:30, Wesley Parish ha scritto:
Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus
throws in a few on the
front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
For a good start, I would suggest:
$ fortune -im unix
--
Dario Niedermann. Also on the Internet at:
gopher://darioniedermann.it/ <> https://www.darioniedermann.it/ 
4:58 a.m.
> "You can tune a piano, but you can't
tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)
Wasn't it "tuna fish"?
Nope:
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."
https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/master/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8
Interestingly, in FreeBSD 6.0, they (apparently) decided that the
contraction was lazy:
"You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish."
https://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/release/6.0.0/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8
-Jason
5:28 a.m.
On Fri, 6 Oct 2017, jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net wrote:
Hmmm... Looks like organic bit-rot on my part :-(
Then again: http://www.rhymes.net/rhyme/tunafish refers to 4.2 BSD
tunefs(8).
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
> "You
can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)
Wasn't it "tuna fish"?
Nope:
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."
https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/master/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8
8:33 a.m.
"Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared
in the V6 man pages.
This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being
"utterly frozen."
The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special
command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the
user's home dir.
Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is
utterly frozen."
For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael
John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm
(his initials).
This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its
programmers.
Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware
"Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with
the idea.
I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator. I got an
immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.
8:40 a.m.
Mike Lesk told me, (so this is now officially apocryphal because its
friend-of-a-friend) that TBL had stuff in there, to specifically
address a faulty throw-back action in the linotronic output device,
and thats why troff/tbl output on more modern things like the wet
process benson varian printer we had, drew some of the lines out of
whack: it was adjusting for another typesetters mechanical positioning
faults.
I'd love to know if this is true. I did look under the hood at T/Roff
and it was indescribably weirder than I imagined. I thought the macros
were weird, then I discovered what the expanded to.
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
"Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but
is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages.
This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being
"utterly frozen."
The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special
command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the
user's home dir.
Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is
utterly frozen."
For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael
John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm
(his initials).
This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its
programmers.
Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware
"Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with
the idea.
I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator. I got
an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.
8:48 a.m.
tbl was a real hack. It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was
to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer. Oddly, decades after I thought everbody
(including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters
someone sends me a manual. Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines
on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.
"Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked. Sure enough it was.
8:55 a.m.
that may be what I am referring to. if you transpose horizontal and
vertical, this may be a hack, to get around a mispositioning logic.
-g
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
tbl was a real hack. It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it
was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer. Oddly, decades after I thought everbody
(including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters
someone sends me a manual. Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines
on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.
"Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked. Sure enough it was.
8:59 a.m.
My greatest hack of creation/origination was to combine EQN, TBL and
TROFF to make a phone directory with giant ellipsis around people
sharing offices and phone extensions, because the new PABX produced a
visually boring directory and I was asked to re-produce the handmade
version, after the typesetter who did it had retired. (this was a
university)
I didn't get remotely close to his hand-set product, but I did ok. I
did wind up doing horrendous cheats which morally feel like a GOTO.
Probably, somebody wiser could have done it more honestly. I only had
to make one, nobody cared after we did that one but it was a thing of
beauty. You've made me very happy recalling it.
These tools were arcane, but damn, it was fun making them work.
G
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:55 PM, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
that may be what I am referring to. if you transpose
horizontal and
vertical, this may be a hack, to get around a mispositioning logic.
-g
On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
> tbl was a real hack. It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as
it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer. Oddly, decades after I thought
everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text
formatters someone sends me a manual. Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the
vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel
too high. "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked. Sure enough it
was.
>
>
6:21 p.m.
We used to use “rms” as a verb, to log in to somebody else’s account with a well known
password, as in “I rms’ed into the box and rebooted it.”
-Don
On 7 Oct 2017, at 04:33, Ron Natalie
<ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
"Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared
in the V6 man pages.
This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being
"utterly frozen."
The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special
command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the
user's home dir.
Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is
utterly frozen."
For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael
John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm
(his initials).
This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its
programmers.
Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware
"Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with
the idea.
I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator. I got
an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.
2633
days inactive
2636
days old
32 comments
21 participants
participants (21)
-
A. P. Garcia -
Bakul Shah -
Dan Cross -
Dario Niedermann -
Dave Horsfall -
Don Hopkins -
George Michaelson -
Greg 'groggy' Lehey -
jason-tuhs＠shalott.net -
Jon Steinhart -
Larry McVoy -
Robert Brockway -
ron minnich -
Ron Natalie -
Russell Page -
Steffen Nurpmeso -
Steve Nickolas -
Steve Simon -
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo -
Warner Losh -
Wesley Parish