[TUHS] Bringing a Chainsaw

Marc Donner marc.donner at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 08:23:00 AEST 2022


I heard from Mike Cowlishaw about the IBM jargon items "branch to Fishkill"
and "branch to Owego"

They reflect a set of site pairs within IBM in which one site designed and
made hardware (Fishkill, Owego) and another site designs and builds
software (Kingston, Endicott).  To the software folks the hardware world
was esoteric and weird, hence the branch targets for weirdness were the
hardware sites.
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 12:15 PM Marc Donner <marc.donner at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike is an old friend ... I will send him a copy of "Bringing a Chainsaw"
> and ask ... I don't think he was in Yorktown at the time but I probably
> told him about the work while it was happening.
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 11:56 AM Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org> wrote:
>
>> John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> writes:
>>
>> > Some editions of the Jargon File contain an entry for _branch to
>> > Fishkill_, defined as "Any unexpected jump in a program that produces
>> > catastrophic or just plain weird results" and attributed to IBM.
>>
>> Mike Cowlishaw's IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary, Tenth
>> Edition <http://www.comlay.net/ibmjarg.pdf> was probably the source for
>> this -- it includes both "branch to Fishkill" and "branch to Owego" with
>> exactly this definition.
>>
>> --
>> Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>
>>
>
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