[TUHS] SCCS roach motel

[Aron Insinga]

p.s. I should have looked at more hits before sending that.  Here's the 
ad (or one of them):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKhGHxO-woc

- Aron

On 12/13/24 16:37, Aron Insinga wrote:
> 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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