[TUHS] SCCS roach motel

[Aron Insinga]

The product and its advertising tag line still exist:

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Black-Flag-Roach-Motel-Insect-Glue-Traps-2-Count-HG-11020-1/204237338

https://images.thdstatic.com/productImages/e8dd1acb-7a49-40ce-8ae2-c582c8bda9a2/svn/brown-black-flag-insect-traps-hg-11020-1-64_1000.jpg

Note the red rectangle-with-rounded-corners under the large yellow word 
'Motel' on the front of the box.

- Aron


On 12/13/24 16:27, Rob Pike wrote:
> To answer your actual question, it is of course a riff on a TV ad for 
> a cockroach trap in the 1980s. The sentiment of the quote, as I saw it 
> (it's possible I was the one who added it to the fortunes file after 
> ken saw the SCCS burble at the top of some file from USG and laughed), 
> was primarily a reaction to the taint it added to the previously 
> annotation-free top of the file. It was also a response to the march 
> of corporate code management stepping into the research world, or 
> perhaps the hacker world. It's a philosophical thing, a feeling, not 
> an argument.
>
> It all seems so quaint now.
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 8:22 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     According to the Unix room fortunes file, the actual quote is
>
>     SCCS: the source-code motel -- your code checks in but it never
>     checks out.
>     Ken Thompson
>
>     On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 3:52 AM Marc Rochkind
>     <mrochkind at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering has asked me to
>         write a retrospective on the influence of SCCS over the last
>         50 years, as my SCCS paper was published in 1975. They
>         consider it one of the most influential papers from TSE's
>         first decade.
>
>         There's a funny quote from Ken Thompson that circulates from
>         time-to-time:
>
>         "SCCS, the source motel! Programs check in and never check out!"
>
>         But nobody seems to know what it means exactly. As part of my
>         research, I asked Ken what the quote meant, sunce I wanted to
>         include it. He explained that it refers to SCCS storing binary
>         data in its repository file, preventing UNIX text tools from
>         operating on the file.
>
>         Of course, this is only one of SCCS's many weaknesses. If you
>         have anything funny about any of the others, post it here. I
>         already have all the boring usual stuff (e.g., long-term
>         locks, file-oriented, no merging).
>
>         Marc Rochkind
>         mrochkind.com <http://mrochkind.com>
>
>
>
>
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