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* [TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past
@ 2015-01-02 22:36 Norman Wilson
  2015-01-02 23:00 ` John Cowan
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 14+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2015-01-02 22:36 UTC (permalink / raw)


Dave Horsfall:

> At yet another, we had a Sun 3/50 window connected to a Convex, and acted 
> all innocent when various dweebs did the old "echo 99k2vp..." etc trick.

John Cowan:

  High-precision approximation to sqrt(2).  What's the trick?

======

Not really a trick, just a hoary old zero-order CPU benchmark:

	echo 99k2vp | time dc

You can see why letting people type that on a Convex thinking it was
a Sun 3/50 might have entertainment value.

Modern systems are far too fast for that to be worth while, though.
I still use a variant of it: a shell script called dc-N, containing

dc <<!
99k[2vszla1-dsa0<b]sb${1-500}salbx
!

meant to be invoked as

	time dc-N 10000

or the like.  (The internal default of 500 has long since gone
stale too, of course.)

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON



^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past
@ 2015-01-01 11:44 Ronald Natalie
  2015-01-01 14:30 ` Clem Cole
  2015-01-02 19:49 ` Dave Horsfall
  0 siblings, 2 replies; 14+ messages in thread
From: Ronald Natalie @ 2015-01-01 11:44 UTC (permalink / raw)


[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1269 bytes --]

A prosperous New Years to all us old UNIX farts.

Years ago the USENIX conference was in Atlanta.    It was a stark contrast between us and the Southern Baptists who were in town for their conference as well (punctuated at some goofball Baptist standing up in the middle of one of the restaurants to sing God Bless America or some such).

Anyhow, right before the conference someone (I think it was Dennis) made some comment about nobody ever having asked him for a cast of his genitals.   A couple of friends decided we needed to issue genital casting kits to certain of the UNIX notables.    I went out to an art supply store and bought plaster, paper cups, popsicle sticks to mix with, etc…   Gould computers let me use one of their booth machines and a printer to print out the instructions.   I purloined some bags from the hotel.   It was pointed out that you need vaseline in order for the plaster to not stick to the skin.    Great, I head into the hotel gift shop and grab ten tiny jars of vaseline.   As I plop these on the counter at the cashier, she looks at me for a minute and then announces…

I guess y’all aren’t with the baptists.

People took it pretty tongue in cheek when they were presented.    All except Redman who flew off the handle. 


^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 14+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2015-01-03 12:56 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2015-01-02 22:36 [TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past Norman Wilson
2015-01-02 23:00 ` John Cowan
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2015-01-01 11:44 Ronald Natalie
2015-01-01 14:30 ` Clem Cole
2015-01-01 23:48   ` scj
2015-01-02  0:46     ` Wesley Parish
2015-01-02  1:53       ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2015-01-02 19:49 ` Dave Horsfall
2015-01-02 20:14   ` Larry McVoy
2015-01-03  0:49     ` Ronald Natalie
2015-01-03 10:29       ` Diomidis Spinellis
2015-01-03 12:56         ` Ronald Natalie
2015-01-02 21:31   ` John Cowan
2015-01-02 23:59   ` Gregg Levine

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