* [TUHS] Festoon
@ 2003-02-26 1:00 Norman Wilson
0 siblings, 0 replies; 6+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2003-02-26 1:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
Ron Hardin, who worked at Western Electric in Columbus (I think)
at the time, confirms that he is the author:
Festoon was mine, chiefly written one Saturday with a tragically flawed
copy of Lester's _Introductory Transformational Grammar of English_
bought that morning on a $1 table at Woolworth on my knee.
The tragic flaw was that there are severe lexical constraints on language,
which is why there are so many made-up words in festoon, to avoid them.
The introduction of awful phrases came in reaction to writer's workbench
from Lorinda Cherry, which had a real mine of them; and phrases from my
boss, S D Hester, who was a wretched writer. People contributed on noticing
that.
It was greatly helped by troff (``The _pay_ people to write this crap?'' is
a typical reaction. Apparently it was not out of the question for Western
Electric.)
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
On the internet, nobody can tell you're whether you're on the internet.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Festoon
@ 2003-02-26 5:46 Dennis Ritchie
2003-02-26 21:58 ` Warren Toomey
0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread
From: Dennis Ritchie @ 2003-02-26 5:46 UTC (permalink / raw)
I have the version of festoon, as enhanced by
Nils-Peter Nelson, and as Norman Wilson said, mainly
and originally done by Ron Hardin. When the
Usenet interchange referred to happened, I asked
Ron whether he wanted to release it, and the
response was
> fine with me
> npn's version is at /home/rhh/coma/festoon/fest.c
> with pics and tbls
> i've lost the original
Incidentally, Hardin worked for Bell Labs, though
at the Columbus location also occupied by
Western Electric, and until fairly recently was
a consultant for our own and nearby groups.
The first Google pages for "hardin sloane"
yields a bunch of references to his joint
work with the well-known mathematician
N. J. A. Sloane.
Binary, but not source, was with research
8th edition, and may have escaped otherwise.
I'll make the source available to scholars if there's interest.
It even compiles on Plan 9 (with ape).
Dennis
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Festoon
@ 2003-02-25 16:13 Tim Bradshaw
2003-02-25 22:52 ` Tim Shoppa
0 siblings, 1 reply; 6+ messages in thread
From: Tim Bradshaw @ 2003-02-25 16:13 UTC (permalink / raw)
Does anyone remember this program (probably /usr/games/festoon) and in
which Unixes it was distributed? I think it must have existed in at
least some BSDs, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't in the ordinary 4.3
distribution.
--tim
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 6+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2003-02-26 21:58 UTC | newest]
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2003-02-26 1:00 [TUHS] Festoon Norman Wilson
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2003-02-26 5:46 Dennis Ritchie
2003-02-26 21:58 ` Warren Toomey
2003-02-25 16:13 Tim Bradshaw
2003-02-25 22:52 ` Tim Shoppa
2003-02-26 3:40 ` Warren Toomey
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