[COFF] Confused managers (was finger usage (was: pronouncing *nix formulas (was: screen editors)))

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday,  8 February 2020 at  9:37:22 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>
>> But over the years I've been surprised how many people have been fooled.
>
> I'm sure that we've all pulled pranks like that.  My favourite was piping
> the output of "man" (a shell script on that system) through "Valley Girl"
> (where each "!" was followed e.g. by "Gag me with a spoon!" etc).
>
> Well, $BOSS came into the office after a "heavy" night, and did something
> like "man uucp", not quite figuring out what was wrong; I was summoned
> shortly afterwards, as I was the only possible culprit...

That brings back another recollection, not Unix-related.

In about 1978 I was getting fed up with the lack of clear text error
messages from Tandem's Guardian operating system.  A typical message
might be

  FILE SYSTEM ERROR 011

Yes, Tandem didn't use leading 0 to indicate octal.  This basically
meant ENOENT, but it was all that the end user saw.  By chance I had
been hacking in the binaries and found ways to catch such messages and
put them through a function which converted them into clear text
messages.  For reasons that no longer make sense to me, I stored the
texts in an external file, which required a program to update it.

Early one morning I was playing around with this, and for the fun of
it I changed the text for error 11 from "File not found" to "Please
enter FUP PURGE ! *" (effectively rm -f *).

I was still giggling about this when the project manager came to me
and said "Mr. Lehey, I think I've done something silly".

Thank God for backups!  We were in a big IBM shop, and the operators
religiously ran a backup every night.  Nothing lost.

Greg
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