h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As I do not see these age-old jokes about UNIX, I will add them FYI
(wish I had invented them, but I didn't)
Try these commands:
* cat "food in tins"
* man woman
* got a light?
* How many ( would I get if I got a ( for every $ the congress spent?
and enjoy the answers unix gives you. There were more, but I do not remember them. Also some of them didn't work, I especially remember one giving as error message "God doesn't exist", but it didn't work from my prompt)

I could only get the cat food one to work.Try and see if you can remember more.We all know lots of Microsoft ones but this is the first time I've come across Unix jokes.Good Fun.
By the way I'm running a SCO Unix box so maybe thats why they don't
all work.

I'm not really a UNIX-guru, so I cannot really explain why they did not work. I tried them in the C-shell... I will include them again here together with the expected answer:
* cat "food in tins"
--> cat: cannot open food in tins
* man woman
--> No manual entry for woman
* got a light?
--> No match.
* cigarette ?
--> No match.
* How many ( would I get if I got a ( for every $ the congress spent?
--> Too many ('s
I found some more too:
* sleep with me
sleep: bad character in argument (OK this one is a bit lame, but some systems answer only a terse "bad character")
* man: why did you get a divorce?
--> man:: Too many arguments
* which god
--> no god in /usr/local/bin /usr/bin /usr/ucb
* set path=pretending; /usr/bin/which sense
--> no sense in pretending
(unfortunately this alters your path settings)
There are some more that do not work for me for some reasons, but I will give the expected answers
* make love
should give--> make: don't know how to make love. Stop (this one doesn't work for me because my shell has another make-program, for me it says: make: *** No rule to make target `love'. Stop. which is not as satisfactory)
* ar t God
should give--> ar: God does not exist (I do not have the program, so I could not test it)

The most complimentary thing Microsoft has ever done for the UN*X community was in naming the OS Windows NT... NT = "New Technology", yet it's based directly on a VAX VMS memory model from the late 1970s... Makes you wonder what older technology the other versions of Windows are based on...

If you take the letters VMS, and add one to each, you get WNT. Coincendence?

With the early versions of WinNT that we got prior to it's release (yes, we're forced to endure buggy microsoft stuff before it's even debugged enough to consider for release) there was a lot of similarity; even down to file names. The swapfile for instance is PAGEFILE.SYS, which is of course the same name as VMS uses by default. (Actually, that's not technically true, pagefile.sys is a page file, not a swap file, but it can be used for both paging and swapping, as opposed to swapfile.sys, which is a swapfile and can therefore only be used for swapping, but if you care about such things, I have a long grey wall of documentation you can have)

From the user's point of view, all versions of windows are shells on top of DOS, even NT; in that you have A:, C:, etc. When are MS going to abandon this 'drive letter' rubbish and allow you to name devices like 'Stuff:' or 'Data:', as in VMS or AmigaDOS; or just abolish the whole thing and have a single directory tree as in unix.

MS-DOS, in it's basic form (i.e. command.com) is instantly recognisable to anyone who has used CP/M; This in turn looks very similar to RSX, although RSX is multi-tasking, and is, I think, a good platform to learn on, because the restricted memory size (32k data, 32k code (in RSX-11M+)) encourages programmers to 'think small', which leads to leaner code.

I had to go and do some work on a VMS system last month. I ended up writing some code in Macro, as it was the only language I could do 64-bit arithmetic in, and get the results the same day (on a MicroVAX-II). Truly amazing, it came back very easily. Once you've got VMS, you're scarred for life....

(The same thing can be said about windows programmers, I think all that mucking about trying to get DLL's to work properly, and fifteen types of memory allocation code depending on how much you want, as opposed to unix's lob-it-in-a-shared-library-any-old-way method, and just the one type of memory) will drive most people off their trolleys...

Oh the fun of being a unix nut in a windows world.

One of my friends has an RT-11 running RSX in his spare room - we wrote a really cool Mandelbrot set zoomer for the VT-100 semigraphic mode... (Each character becomes a 3x2 grid, so in 132 column x 32 line mode you have a resolution of 264x96 "pixels"!) It didn't have the resolution of an upgraded ADM-3A, but the redraw frame rate was about six times as fast - essential for a smooth "zoom".

I worked out the graphics code logic for plotting/clearing individual pixels, he wrote the Macro routines to implement it, we collaborated on the Mandelbrot code in compiled Basic...

I didn't know the VT100 did blocky graphics, although you can put in extra character sets via the AVO board ROM sockets, I've never actually seen it done. It was only four years ago I got rid of the VT100 from my desk (it's still used as a console, and I have a vt420 plugged into the back of my work windows PC, because debugging GUI code is a real pain (with the libraries we've used) so I write to the serial port)).
The VT100 has been 'retired' to the computer room, where it's doing a great job going 'Beep' occasionally as the console of the last remaining MicroVAX II (which is running the accounts).

I once wrote a character set bitmap editor for the VT-220-a-like Volker-Craig terminals we had on the Portsmouth Polytechnic VAXen; One of my more successful unofficial projects (along with NWAY, something instantly recognisable to any IRC'er nowadays, but unheard of back then). The character set editor was played with by loads of people, and when you sat down in a terminal room, you usually found someone had left the terminal set in some strange looking character set as a 'joke'. I lose count home many times the techs got called out because someone left the 'Upside-Down' character set on the screen.

The character editor was written entirely in VAX Pascal, and NWAY sprawled to over 2,000 lines of DCL; a right monster, and a totally inappropriate language for it, but fun never the less.

(NWAY came from 2WAY, a chat program that used SYS$BRKTHRUW and a temporary mailbox to deposit messages on a remote terminal, without using any user privilege other than TMPMBX - It had rooms (for seperate chats), lockable rooms (for private chats), wizards who could summon other users to a room, or teleport through locked doors, and eject unruly participants; after a while it got silly, with hit points, combat (eventually outlawed by me in any room with a vowel in it because people started to forget that they were supposed to be uisng it for) and the arch-wizards's control room (where Source'erers (people who contributed source)) could go and control things.. One remarkably silly function I set was the 'drunk' function, which would adjust someone's speech to make them sound drunk, by shubshtituting sh for every letter s the pershon shaid.

OK, I admit it, it's possible the VT100 doesn't have block graphics... It was actually a "CTC110", a European VT100 clone which was so close in appearance you could swap case parts... The manual said it was identical to a VT100, but if I recall correctly, the graphics codes were an appendix added later.

And how many other OS's have a book on it like
"The Unix Hater's Handbook" (still published), a
collection of the USENET mailing list of the same
name.

This pokes all kinds of fun at UNIX by experienced
UNIX-heads. For example, there's one chapter
entitled: UNIX -- world's first virus.

And it comes with a UNIX barf bag

Check it out ... I think the book is still
available. A classic.

I doubt we'll *ever* see a Windows book quite
like this.

C

Still doesn't quite match up to my favourite programming title, though:

"Programming the Commodore 64 in BASIC, or How to nail Jelly to a Tree."

Somewhere up in the attic I've got a C64. I think it's minus SID chip after I wrenched it out and interfaced it to the PC parallel port as an attempt at a sound card.. Excellent machine for it's time (and sound chip _way_ ahead of it's time; just find a SID file for the game 'Wizball' and a sidplayer program to experience why). The amount of aggravation you have to go through with DMA and assorted wotnot to make a typical sound card of today go 'Boing!' is mindblowing in comparison.

However, I do have a BBC Model B working here, along with a double sided floppy drive. I have another BBC Model B with assorted sideways ROMS, but a broken keyboard and PSU if it's useful as spares to anyone.

Mind you, my prize posession is a whole 512 bytes (thats bytes, not kilobytes or megabytes, just plain ordinary bytes, and probably eight-bit ones at that) of core memory. No amount of money will make me part with that. For all I know, there's still something on it, as core memory doesn't go away when you switch it off. I really must build something to read/write it one day.

Mysterious, H@G2 thinks that C64 is a link, to the Physics catagory. That wasn't intentional. Seems that A27 (the road to my office) is also a link. Anyone found any other unintentional ones.

ENough of that, I'm off storm-watching, looks like a good-un. Time to unplug the television arial...

I've got a rather lovely core store panel too, almost exactly the same size as an LP record sleeve. I also have a particularly pretty 80186 (yes, *1*86!) motherboard, exactly the same size. Someday I'll get them mounted on plywood backings with nice frames around them and hang them on the living room wall.