Unix witticisms

Unix witticisms

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Larry McVoy

    > Annnnnnnd, that's the thread, noone can top that! 

"EMACS - Editor too big"

	Noel

Unix witticisms

[Wesley Parish]

I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page:
Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley

Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?

Wesley Parish

"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

Unix witticisms

[Don Hopkins]

Linux is only free if your time is worthless.

-Don

> On 4 Oct 2017, at 10:30, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> 
> I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page:
> Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
> 
> Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
> of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
> 
> Wesley Parish
> 
> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
> Method for Guitar
> 
> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the "The Joy of UNIX."
Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so  he made
up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of UNIX,"
etc... and handed them out.    I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.

The "is a  trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
Empire."    At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
Trademark."     I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's.    AT&T's lawyers
even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.

There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
codes.    My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.

A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
(Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted in
non-smoking areas.   I think that was also the source of the "Cannot fork--
Try again during lunch" quote.

Unix witticisms

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 10:26 AM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the "The Joy of UNIX."
> Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so  he made
> up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of UNIX,"
> etc... and handed them out.    I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
> lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.
>
> The "is a  trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
> I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
> Empire."    At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
> Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
> 18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
> Trademark."     I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
> the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's.    AT&T's lawyers
> even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
> such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.

A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie, "Spaceballs" is
recurring product spots for the film's promotional materials
("Spaceballs: the toiler paper" was my favorite:
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/c3/53/c3/c353c3a52c70a66b2d7cf456756a361c--movie-drinking-games-s-movies.jpg).
This sounds similar in both character and execution.

        - Dan C.

Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

> A running gag throughout the Mel Brooks movie, "Spaceballs" is recurring product spots for the film's promotional materials

From IMDB:

In a 2013 television interview (shorty before receiving the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award), Mel Brooks stated that he personally obtained George Lucas' full permission to parody any and all things Star Wars-related but, on one condition, that absolutely no merchandise of any kind be produced from the film. This is the reason why all Yogurt and the Dinks do is merchandising (it is also why none of the merchandise seen in the film was ever mass produced or publicly sold in any way).

Unix witticisms

[Jon Steinhart]

Favorite bumper sticker: "Reach out and grep someone".

Unix witticisms

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 5 Oct 2017, Jon Steinhart wrote:

> Favorite bumper sticker: "Reach out and grep someone".

Back at university a friend lost his keys.  He told a group of us in the 
caffeteria that he'd grepped the house for them.  It occured to me that he 
went around the house picking everything up and comparing it to a known 
set of keys.

Rob

Unix witticisms

[Steve Simon]

I remember:

	"Version 7 was an improved on everything that preceeded it,
	and everything that followed".

We regarded Sys-V as rather, well, "untidy" at the time.

-Steve

Unix witticisms

[Bakul Shah]

> On Oct 5, 2017, at 6:01 PM, Steve Simon <steve at quintile.net> wrote:
> 
> I remember:
> 
> 	"Version 7 was an improved on everything that preceeded it,
> 	and everything that followed".

A variation of C.A.R.Hoare's quip in his 1973 paper "Hints on
Programming Language Design" 

  The more I ponder the principles of language design, and
  the techniques which put them into practice, the more is my
  amazement and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so
  far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement
  on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

Unix witticisms

[Russell Page]

ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.


On 6/10/2017 1:26 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
> At the 83 USENIX Sun handed out buttons that said the "The Joy of UNIX."
> Peter Langston thought that was a bit conceited on Bill's part, so  he made
> up buttons for the next show that read "The PSL of UNIX", "The DMR of UNIX,"
> etc... and handed them out.    I still have the Joy of UNIX button, but I
> lost my "Ron of UNIX" button shortly after the show.
>
> The "is a  trademark of bell labs" generated lots of jokes over the year.
> I have somewhere a button that says "Eunuchs are a hallmark of the Ottoman
> Empire."    At one of the early UUGs someone tried to make "UNIX is a
> Trademark of Bell Labs" pencils except the custom pencil place only allowed
> 18 letters or something so the pencils just ended up saying "UNIX is a
> Trademark."     I'm not sure I've ever come across another Trademark that
> the footnote status was as widely propagated as UNIX's.    AT&T's lawyers
> even got up at one of the conferences (in a talk about licensing changes or
> such) and thanked the community for defending the trademark.
>
> There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
> codes.    My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.
>
> A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
> (Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted in
> non-smoking areas.   I think that was also the source of the "Cannot fork--
> Try again during lunch" quote.
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Russell Page
RussellPage at foxhat.net
+61 405 148 325

Unix witticisms

[Don Hopkins]

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> On 7 Oct 2017, at 10:51, Russell Page <RussellPage at foxhat.net> wrote:
> 
> ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.

That’s at AT&T System V error code. The corresponding BSD error code is ENOWEED.

-Don

Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

While not quite a UNIX witticism, we did have a USENIX fun and game.    When I was playing university administrator at Rutgers, I had a student who decided that in order to get a good job he needed to go to USENIX and hang out with all the high powered hackers there.    He convinced some professor to actually fund his attendance, but he wanted to make a good impression.    He got on a rather popular (non-UNIX) mailing list and asked what people wore to the conference.    He thought that he'd actually have to wear a suit.   I pointed out that it was really casual.     Then Erik Fair got a hold of him and told him, yes, you wear shorts and a t-shirt, and sandals, and they had to be Birkenstocks.   So off goes this kid in the dead of winter in New Jersey looking for Birkenstocks.    I think he finally found them.

He went out to the show and had a pretty good time hanging out.    A week after we got back he comes in sporting a new haircut.    I made a polite inquiry about what was up, but he didn't catch my drift.   My then girlfriend bluntly asked him why he had a homosexual (not the word she used) haircut.    He said that all the hackers we hung out with at the conference had that hairstyle.   I had to point out to him that they were all gay.

Never did find out what happened to that kid after graduation.

Unix witticisms

[Don Hopkins]

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> Never did find out what happened to that kid after graduation.
> 

He was last seen going up to John Draper’s hotel room for back exercises. c(-;

-Don

Unix witticisms

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Oct 07, 2017 at 03:22:42PM +0200, Don Hopkins wrote:
> 
> > On 7 Oct 2017, at 10:51, Russell Page <RussellPage at foxhat.net> wrote:
> > 
> > ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.
> 
> That???s at AT&T System V error code. The corresponding BSD error code is ENOWEED.
> 
> -Don

Annnnnnnd, that's the thread, noone can top that!  ROTFL.

--lm

Unix witticisms

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Russell Page <RussellPage at foxhat.net> wrote:
 |On 6/10/2017 1:26 AM, Ron Natalie wrote:
 ...
 |> There was a contest back on UNIX-WIZARDS in the day to generate new errno
 |> codes.    My favorite was ELECTROLUX - Your code needs cleaning up.
 |>
 |> A joke issue of the Computation Center at UT Austin's newsletter
 |> (Universally Plexus at Autism) had an item about UNIX Pipes not permitted \
 |> in
 |> non-smoking areas.   I think that was also the source of the "Cannot \
 |> fork--
 |> Try again during lunch" quote.
 ...
 |ENOTOBACCO - call would block on empty pipe.

You know, i liked that so much when i have heard this first that
the BSD Mail i maintain uses the following as a catch-all error:

  ?0!0/NONE[#/var/spool/mail/steffen]? echo \
      $^ERR-1000: $^ERRNAME-1000: $^ERRDOC-1000
  255: NOTOBACCO: Snorkeling on empty pipe

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)

Unix witticisms

[Russell Page]

I can't remember where, but I once saw "UNIX is a registered footnote of 
Bell Laboratories".


On 4/10/2017 7:30 PM, Wesley Parish wrote:
> I've just visited Slashdot and found this little gem at the bottom of the page:
> Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley
>
> Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the front cover
> of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
>
> Wesley Parish
>
> "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
> Method for Guitar
>
> "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
>
>

-- 
Russell Page
RussellPage at foxhat.net
+61 405 148 325

Unix witticisms

[Steve Nickolas]

The one that comes to mind is "Unix is user-friendly; it's just picky 
about who its friends are."

-uso.

Unix witticisms

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday,  5 October 2017 at 21:43:36 +1100, Russell Page wrote:
> I can't remember where, but I once saw "UNIX is a registered footnote of
> Bell Laboratories".

My favourite was:

UNIX is a registered trade mark of AT&T
AT&T is a modem test command.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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Unix witticisms

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> writes:

> Unix is a Registered Bell of AT&T Trademark Laboratories. -- Donn Seeley

That reminds me of this one (I don't know where I picked it up, though):

"UNIX is a registered trade mark of AT&T.  AT&T is a modem test command."

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay

Unix witticisms

[Dario Niedermann]

Il 04/10/2017 alle 10:30, Wesley Parish ha scritto:

> Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the
> front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?

For a good start, I would suggest:

$ fortune -im unix

-- 
Dario Niedermann.                 Also on the Internet at:

gopher://darioniedermann.it/  <>  https://www.darioniedermann.it/

Unix witticisms

[George Michaelson]

I loved the man page for the ching program had in BUGS: "it futhers
one to seek the great man"

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 9:01 AM, Dario Niedermann
<dario at darioniedermann.it> wrote:
> Il 04/10/2017 alle 10:30, Wesley Parish ha scritto:
>
>> Unix seems to have garnered witticisms: Salus throws in a few on the
>> front cover of his book. Has anyone made a collection of them?
>
> For a good start, I would suggest:
>
> $ fortune -im unix
>
> --
> Dario Niedermann.                 Also on the Internet at:
>
> gopher://darioniedermann.it/  <>  https://www.darioniedermann.it/

Unix witticisms

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 9:48 AM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:

> I loved the man page for the ching program had in BUGS: "it futhers
> one to seek the great man"


"You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)
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Unix witticisms

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2017, Warner Losh wrote:

> "You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)

Wasn't it "tuna fish"?

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

Unix witticisms

[jason-tuhs]

>> "You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)

> Wasn't it "tuna fish"?

Nope:

"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."

https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/master/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8


Interestingly, in FreeBSD 6.0, they (apparently) decided that the 
contraction was lazy:

"You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish."

https://svn0.us-west.freebsd.org/base/release/6.0.0/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8


  -Jason

Unix witticisms

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 6 Oct 2017, jason-tuhs at shalott.net wrote:

>>> "You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish." -- tunefs(8)
>
>> Wasn't it "tuna fish"?
>
> Nope:
>
> "You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish."
>
> https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/master/sbin/tunefs/tunefs.8

Hmmm...  Looks like organic bit-rot on my part :-(

Then again: http://www.rhymes.net/rhyme/tunafish refers to 4.2 BSD 
tunefs(8).

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

"Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages.

This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being "utterly frozen."
The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the user's home dir.
Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is utterly frozen."

For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm (his initials).
This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its programmers.

Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware "Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with the idea.
I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator.    I got an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.

Unix witticisms

[George Michaelson]

Mike Lesk told me, (so this is now officially apocryphal because its
friend-of-a-friend) that TBL had stuff in there, to specifically
address a faulty throw-back action in the linotronic output device,
and thats why troff/tbl output on more modern things like the wet
process benson varian printer we had, drew some of the lines out of
whack: it was adjusting for another typesetters mechanical positioning
faults.

I'd love to know if this is true. I did look under the hood at T/Roff
and it was indescribably weirder than I imagined. I thought the macros
were weird, then I discovered what the expanded to.

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:33 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> "Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages.
>
> This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being "utterly frozen."
> The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the user's home dir.
> Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is utterly frozen."
>
> For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm (his initials).
> This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its programmers.
>
> Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware "Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with the idea.
> I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator.    I got an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.
>
>

Unix witticisms

[Ron Natalie]

tbl was a real hack.    It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer.      Oddly, decades after I thought everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters someone sends me a manual.    Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.    "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked.   Sure enough it was.

Unix witticisms

[George Michaelson]

that may be what I am referring to. if you transpose horizontal and
vertical, this may be a hack, to get around a mispositioning logic.

-g

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
> tbl was a real hack.    It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer.      Oddly, decades after I thought everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters someone sends me a manual.    Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.    "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked.   Sure enough it was.
>
>

Unix witticisms

[George Michaelson]

My greatest hack of creation/origination was to combine EQN, TBL and
TROFF to make a phone directory with giant ellipsis around people
sharing offices and phone extensions, because the new PABX produced a
visually boring directory and I was asked to re-produce the handmade
version, after the typesetter who did it had retired. (this was a
university)

I didn't get remotely close to his hand-set product, but I did ok. I
did wind up doing horrendous cheats which morally feel like a GOTO.
Probably, somebody wiser could have done it more honestly. I only had
to make one, nobody cared after we did that one but it was a thing of
beauty. You've made me very happy recalling it.

These tools were arcane, but damn, it was fun making them work.

G

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:55 PM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> that may be what I am referring to. if you transpose horizontal and
> vertical, this may be a hack, to get around a mispositioning logic.
>
> -g
>
> On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>>
>> tbl was a real hack.    It wasn't so much designed for the troff CAT output as it was to drive nroff on a daisy wheel printer.      Oddly, decades after I thought everbody (including me as a last troff holdout) had abandoned it for more wisiwyg text formatters someone sends me a manual.    Tbl had a slight telltale glitch in that the vertical lines on the left and right side of the table almost always protruded one pixel too high.    "Did you use tbl|troff to generate this?" I asked.   Sure enough it was.
>>
>>

Unix witticisms

[Don Hopkins]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1308 bytes --]

We used to use “rms” as a verb, to log in to somebody else’s account with a well known password, as in “I rms’ed into the box and rebooted it.”

-Don


> On 7 Oct 2017, at 04:33, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> 
> "Roff is the simplest of the run off programs but is utterly frozen " appeared in the V6 man pages.
> 
> This led to a whole slew (at least at JHU) comments in program documents about being "utterly frozen."
> The large freshman "Models and Simulation" class used basic plus and a special command called "lnmns" was created to link the necessary files into the user's home dir.
> Our docs said that "lnmns was the simplenst of the transcendental programs but is utterly frozen."
> 
> For those who know nroff/troff, we had fun in that our senior programmer "Michael John Muuss" wrote a macro package called tmac.jm which was invoked with nroff -mjm (his initials).
> This lead to all kinds of jokes including calling lnmns "bill" after its programmers.
> 
> Many years later there was a proposal to rename the concept of freeware "Flugelware" after some guy named "Flugel" who alledgedly came up with the idea.
> I suggested that we call the C compiler "Ritchie" after its creator.    I got an immediate reponse from dmr telling me to nip that idea in the bud.
> 
>