[TUHS] Mark V Shaney (Re: Re: On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum))

[Dan Cross]

On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 2:44 AM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:
> My name is Rob Pike and I approve this message.

Regarding Mark V. Shaney, I once heard a story that someone was so
upset about some of its posts on USENET that they drove to Bell Labs
to confront it, not realizing "he" was in fact a program, and not a
person. On arriving at the labs, someone explained what was what, they
went home, and that was the end of it.

But, in the version I heard, they drove from, like, Ohio...or
somewhere in the midwest.  I find this very difficult to believe:
surely by the time they got to Harrisburg, perhaps, they'd have cooled
down enough to realize they were making poor life choices and should
turn around and go back home.

Is there any truth to this, or is the story (as I suspect) just apocryphal?

        - Dan C.