[TUHS] Festoon

[TUHS] Festoon

[Tim Bradshaw]

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

[TUHS] Festoon

[Tim Shoppa]

>Does anyone remember this program (probably /usr/games/festoon)

It's come up at least twice on alt.folklore.computers in the last decade,
but I've never seen a pointer to the actual source yet.  e.g.

  http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=391cb661%40news.adfa.oz.au&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dfestoon%2Balt.folklore.computers%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26hl%3Den%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch

Tim.

[TUHS] Festoon

[Warren Toomey]

In article by Tim Shoppa:
> >Does anyone remember this program (probably /usr/games/festoon)
> 
> It's come up at least twice on alt.folklore.computers in the last decade,
> but I've never seen a pointer to the actual source yet.

% tar vtzf PDP-11/Distributions/ucb/2.9BSD/usr.tar.gz | grep -i fest
-rwxrwxr-x 3/3           37484 Nov 17 13:00 1982 ./games/festoon
-rw-rw-rw- 1/1            3536 Aug  2 23:08 1983 ./man/cat6/festoon.6
-rw-r--r-- 3/3            3012 Aug  2 21:26 1983 ./man/man6/festoon.6

% tar vtzf Applications/Shoppa_Tapes/usenix878889.tar.gz | grep -i festoon
drwxr-xr-x 100/10            0 Mar 29 06:53 1989 usenix89/:Bugs/Festoon/
drwxr-xr-x 100/10            0 Mar 29 06:53 1989 usenix89/:Bugs/Festoon/:BUGS/
-r--r--r-- 100/10         2975 Jul  2 02:48 1987 usenix89/:Bugs/Festoon/:BUGS/1

That's all I can find in the Unix Archive at present.

	Warren

P.S ./games/festoon is an 0407 binary. No source.

[TUHS] Festoon

[Warren Toomey]

In article by Dennis Ritchie:
> I'll make the Festoon source available to scholars if there's interest.
> It even compiles on Plan 9 (with ape).
> 	Dennis

Dennis has passed the source to me with permission to include it in the
Unix Archive. It's now there at Applications/Festoon, e.g
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Applications/Festoon/
until the other mirrors pick it up.

	Warren

[TUHS] Festoon

[Dennis Ritchie]

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

[TUHS] Festoon

[Norman Wilson]

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.