Unix witticisms

Ron Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Sat Oct 7 12:33:59 AEST 2017


"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.





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