Unix witticisms

[Don Hopkins]

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.
> 
>