[TUHS] Happy New Year and an amusing story from the past

[Norman Wilson]

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