What ever happened to the fun?
Peter L. Wargo
thought crossed my mind... "This Documentation has a sense of humor..."
(Particularly disturbing to one who writes docs for a living...)
A couple of days later, I was reading a book by Donald Kranz and James
Stanley about 68000 assembly language, when I started rolling around on
the ground in laughter at some of the lines in the book - for example:
"It seems the hardware types who wrote the 68000 manual, who really
don't care what kind of hoops we software types have to jump through,
thought they could hang 64 megabytes of memory on a 68000 by decoding
these function code pins into four 16-megabyte banks, one for user program,
one for user data, one for supervisor program, and one for supervisor
data. They probably talked some poor Pascal programmer, who of course
didn't know any better, into coming to Management with them when they
presented the idea. No doubt the guy who had the idea in the first
place came over from Intel. (You old timers may remember an obscure
passage in the 8080 manual along the same lines. That was what led to
the glut of 256K 8080 systems.)"
Thinking back over the years, I've come to the conclusion that the
computer industry, as a whole, is losing its sense of humor. I can
remember when a phone call to Sun was answered by someone who really
cared, not a request for "system serial number, please." (They loved it
when I dumped my old Sun 2/120 # at them...) :-)
Is it me, or is the industry getting boring?
-Pete
--
----------
Peter L. Wargo - war...@sun.soe.clarkson.edu, GEnie mail PSYCLOPS
psyc...@foof.dorm.clarkson.edu
Enable Software, Inc. - Purveyors of Fine Integrated Software since 1984
Jeffrey T Berntsen
>Thinking back over the years, I've come to the conclusion that the
>computer industry, as a whole, is losing its sense of humor. I can
>remember when a phone call to Sun was answered by someone who really
>cared, not a request for "system serial number, please." (They loved it
>when I dumped my old Sun 2/120 # at them...) :-)
>Is it me, or is the industry getting boring?
Yup. I think it stems from the industry being invaded by too many suits (
2-piece, 3-piece, and law) for it to be anything approaching fun any more :(.
Jeff Berntsen
je...@world.std.com
Charles Lasner
thereof:
Hackers apparentyly do what they do because that's where the fun in
computers really is.
Someone complained that the demeanor of the CS-only types at his school was
to "brown-nose" their way into high grades, actually learn as little as
possible, short-term memorize by rote whatever they needed to pass, etc,
never wrote any code beyond the assignments' minimums, and overall had the
demeanor of "accountants" as I recollect it.
So, maybe fun is writing n*10 lines/day where N is large, while N=0 or 1
maximum for the anal-retentive. I guess CS types are just bean counters
who prefer to have the counting done my machine :-).
cjl (Gee, I once wrote 10 lines in under a minute, then slept for the rest of
the day :-))
Lindsey Durway
> I was thumbing through some SunOS 1.1 manuals recently, and a disturbing
> thought crossed my mind... "This Documentation has a sense of humor..."
>
>
> Is it me, or is the industry getting boring?
It appears that you've been in the writing business longer than I have
(that is, more than 7 years). The common writing style was already largely
dry & dull when I started. What made it interesting when I started,
however, was the varied backgrounds of the writers. Tech writers had
degrees from all over the academic spectrum: Rhetoric, Philosophy, Ballet,
Chemistry, Limnology, Medieval History, German, and so on (not to mention
English). Today, on the other hand, it seems that the pedigreed writers
are taking over. Did the Technical and Professional Writing disciplines
even exist (at more than a few schools) 10 years ago when I was in
college? It seems now every corner technical institute has a tech
writing program.
I don't hold it against anyone for pursuing Tech Writing as a real
"field," but I kind of miss the way the tech writing bidness used to be
largely a hodgepodge of wayward academics and bastard literature jocks.
I guess this is part of the same legitimization (?) of the field that
you say makes our docs so serious these days.
Ah, well, back to my nice, boring software tome,
Lindsey
--
Lindsey Durway, a guy.
dur...@rtp.dg.com -or- {world}!mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!durway
Data General Corp., Research Triangle Park, NC; (919) 248-6166.
Computer programs are like martyrs--the real shit
doesn't hit the fan until you execute them.
Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University
of humour is not quite extinct.
My boss told me the story once of receiving an insert for an IBM manual
which had a page in it that was blank except for the words "DESTROY
THIS PAGE".
On second thoughts, I think that was meant seriously :-). But *this* one
definitely wasn't: a recent manual I got from _another_ company followed
the usual style where the package contains an empty three-ring binder,
a bunch of manual pages in a shrink-wrap packet, and a set of tabs in
another shrink-wrap packet. What you have to do is put the pages in the
binder, and then insert the tabs in the right places among the pages.
What was different about this manual was that they had thoughtfully
inserted blue marker pages in between the sections of the manual, to let
you know where to put the tabs. On the front of each marker page (which you
were supposed to throw away after inserting the tabs) was written the words
"FPO: REPLACE WITH TAB".
And on the *back* of each marker page: "FPO: REPLACE WITH BACK OF TAB".
Now, if that's not a sense of humour...
Lawrence D'Oliveiro fone: +64-7-856-2889
Computer Services Dept fax: +64-7-838-4066
University of Waikato electric mail: l...@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand 37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00
Warner Losh
(Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes:
>Well, there are still one or two computer companies around where a sense
>of humour is not quite extinct.
From the 4.0D man page for /bin/sh on Solbourne systems:
: A pipeline is a sequence of two or more commands
: separated by `|' or by `^' (for hysterical raisins).
Warner
--
Warner Losh i...@Solbourne.COM MMP to DoD #882
"You better stay away from him, he'll rip your lungs out Jim,
He's looking for James Taylor" -- Werewolves of Boulder WZ
Noah Friedman
>From the 4.0D man page for /bin/sh on Solbourne systems:
>: A pipeline is a sequence of two or more commands
>: separated by `|' or by `^' (for hysterical raisins).
Then there's the famous "bug" in tunefs(8). Apparently, in SunOS 4.1.0,
someone removed this from the tunefs man page. In SunOS 4.1.1, someone put
it back with the following comment in the nroff source:
if run on the root file system, the system must be rebooted.
.\" Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.sp
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
I hope they at least leave this in Solaris.
BTW, did this ever originally read "You can tune a filesystem, but you
can't tunefs" ?
El Camino Acid
It's not always the computer companies lacking the sense of humor;
sometimes it's their customers:
Many years ago a fairly new programmer, not a native English speaker, was
modifying some spaghetti code. She needed to put some kind of counter
variable in, and since COUNT and CNT were already used, and not realizing
the utility of a more descriptive/less confusing name, she used the
name COUNT spelled without the O. And a customer actually wrote an irate
letter to our company president, complaining about obscenities in the
source code! Ok, the variable name choice was inadvertent, and not
really funny, but the customer's overreaction to it was. I believe that
their vehemence was so off-putting that that "bug report" got spiked
immediately.
Matthew Rabuzzi "Tell that customer to go mount his disks"
fis...@qut.edu.au
>
> It's not always the computer companies lacking the sense of humor;
> sometimes it's their customers:
>
of ICL) sold large 1902s with 8K 24 bit words and no disks so the most
important application program supplied with systems was the Mag Tape
Polyphase Sort which had to be very efficient. The programmers cleverly
linked their code so that it went backwards through memory allowing the
code which was no longer required to be added to the buffers at the end
and hence allowing longer strings and therefore greater efficiency in
the later phases. This meant that when they were opening the input tape
they could afford to be inefficient so putting up an empty tape resulted
in a rather impolite but hilarious message the gist of which was "You
thought you could fool us by putting up an empty tape but we thought you
might so you have not broken our program but you have wasted a lot of
your time ..... " on and on for about 40 lines of 72 characters.
Remember that in those days consoles typed at 10 characters per second.
Most user programmers had seen the message and laughed at it but one of
our customers put on a demonstration of a new system for their VIPs.
Through their error, when it came time to sort the transactions ready
for a merge there were none so out came the message.
The customer had no sense of humour and the message had to be deleted
from the software.
Bill Fisher
Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University
a certain well-known C compiler:
String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than
ANSI said I should)
...And the lord said, 'lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside
a switch statement'
a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program
'Volatile' and 'Register' are not miscible
This struct already has a perfectly good definition
This union already has a perfectly good definition
This enum already has a perfectly good definition
Only one parameter per register please
type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you
don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)
This array has no size, and that's bad
Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's why)
Huh ?
can't go mucking with a 'void *'
we already did this function
This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this
label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your
window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message
Call me paranoid but finding '/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious
This function has an explicit return type and deserves a return value
Too many errors on one line (make fewer)
Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your
local [name deleted] dealer
James Adams
(much like TopView) when we got a crash. The message that popped up began:
OHMIGOD ....
--
+---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
|James Adams | "Why hold an election if we can't |
| sas...@unx.sas.com | win?" |
| | overheard in Algeria |
+---------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+