[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[Norman Wilson]

I don't know where the Groklaw posting came from,
but the info is garbled in two ways:

1.  It's not E_GREG, any more than it was ever E_NXIO
or E_IO or E_ACCES.  It's EGREG.

2.  The associated message is not and never was Greg
did it but It's all Greg's fault.

The Greg in question is indeed Greg Chesson; the saying
was part of the culture when I arrived in 1127 in 1984.
I knew the story once but have forgotten.

EGREG was put into the system initially half as a joke,
half as a spare error code for debugging kernel code.
Then, as I vaguely recall, Andrew Hume started using it
for real in his WORM-device driver, rather than inventing
a new code if he really needed it.  This is how software
grows and why it must be pruned, or even razed to the
ground, now and then.

The phrase It's all so-and-so's fault, and variations
on that theme, appeared now and then in other ways in
the culture.  My favourite was when Tom Duff augmented
the simple code (just a shell script, I think) that
sent printer-status warnings to the UNIX Room voice
synthesizer so that it didn't just say Please add paper,
it said Please add paper, dammit t d (if the current job
was td's).  Except that for a while, for reasons that
now escape me, it was deliberatly changed to say dammit
andrew (Hume) no matter who's stuff was printing.  It
took a week or two before Andrew noticed.

It was a kindergarten there, but a fun and productive one.
I don't miss living in northern New Jersey (which is why
I left the group in 1990) but I do miss the group as it
then was, and no longer is nor ever again shall be.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(Actually typing this whilst sitting
somewhere northeast of Emeryville CA)
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[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[Tim Newsham]

> 	E_GREG Greg did it.

Greg Chesson: http://9fans.net/archive/2005/03/201

Egreg lives on in plan9 although the text changes from
time to time:

http://swtch.com/cgi-bin/plan9history.cgi?f=port/error.h;v=history

There was a thread about it on 9fans. See
http://9fans.net/archive/2005/03

> 	Warren

Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com
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[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[Brantley Coile]

Greg Chesson. He designed the uucp g protocol. There was a piece of  
networking gear at Murray hill that Greg worked on that every now and  
then would fail to connect. Someone modified the message to read "it's  
all Greg's fault.". Later the string became an errno, I think for the  
Netb file server protocol. Plan 9 still has an EGREG even though it is  
a string in plan 9. It now reads "Ken has left the building."

iPhone email

On Dec 15, 2009, at 7:02 PM, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I just saw this on Groklaw:
>
>    There were not many machines which ran Version 10. They were all
>    at Murray Hill and some of them were donated to Auburn University
>    when AT&T closed up shop.  We got some old MicroVAX machines and
>    a couple of printed manuals. One of the printed manuals lists
>    various error codes. One of them is
>
>    E_GREG Greg did it.
>
>    Poor Greg. who was he, really?
>
> Anybody know the answer? Norman?
>
> P.S Merry Xmas to all.
> Cheers,
>    Warren
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> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
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[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[Larry McVoy]

I dunno but here, where my login is "lm", we have "lm3di".  Which
somehow translates to "lm made me do it".

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 10:02:52AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> I just saw this on Groklaw:
> 
> 	There were not many machines which ran Version 10. They were all
> 	at Murray Hill and some of them were donated to Auburn University
> 	when AT&T closed up shop.  We got some old MicroVAX machines and
> 	a couple of printed manuals. One of the printed manuals lists
> 	various error codes. One of them is
> 
> 	E_GREG Greg did it.
> 
> 	Poor Greg. who was he, really?
> 
> Anybody know the answer? Norman?
> 
> P.S Merry Xmas to all.
> Cheers,
> 	Warren
> _______________________________________________
> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com
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[TUHS] E_GREG ??

[Warren Toomey]

I just saw this on Groklaw:

	There were not many machines which ran Version 10. They were all
	at Murray Hill and some of them were donated to Auburn University
	when AT&T closed up shop.  We got some old MicroVAX machines and
	a couple of printed manuals. One of the printed manuals lists
	various error codes. One of them is

	E_GREG Greg did it.

	Poor Greg. who was he, really?

Anybody know the answer? Norman?

P.S Merry Xmas to all.
Cheers,
	Warren
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