Unix witticisms

Ron Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Fri Oct 6 00:26:54 AEST 2017


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.






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