What's happened to the PavingExpert site ???

[Bob Minchin]

Thanks for the UKC pics link. I was there 1972-75 and used the KOS set up I even remember my user ID - CCT019 sad or what! I was taught by both Peter (Mr KOS) and Heather Brown. Bob

[Bob Eager]

Aha...you're THAT Minchin! I was a postgrad there for your last year...

[Bob Eager]

Computing and Cybernetics, then. You probably remember Tony West - who eventually became a Sun vice-president, and is a reason why we now have such close links with Sun!

[Bob Minchin]

Oh! Did I make some sort of impression then? I tend to keep a low profile most of the time.

Yes I did the Computing & Cybernetics degree course but then moved back to my hobby roots and have been working at Roke Manor Research in radio related electronics ever since (33+ years!) I don't recall your name from those days but I guess you might have done a few tutorial sessions for my course. Is the CC course still run these days?

Regards

Bob

[Bob Eager]

There weren't many of you in those days...

Probably, may have been PDP-11 assembler! We moved on to get what is supposed to have been the first UNIX system in England, in 1976.

It became an unpopular name...it's now the Computer Systems Engineering course. We run many other courses though...straight CS with about half a dozen variations (networks, AI, business, etc.) and a few other things.

[Huge]

enter anthea anthea not available now

[Huge]

Keynes, NS, 72-75.

[Huge]

[Huge]

Agreed.

Me too.

Mine was something like BU002 - Biology Undergraduate.

Prof.Brown took my 1st year Computing course.

[Bob Eager]

That would be BIU002.

A few years later and I was teaching that (the same course I'd taken as an undergraduate!)

[Bob Eager]

Yes, I still remember Anthea!

[Huge]

Me too. :o)

[Huge]

That's the one. The second person in Bilgy ever to get a username. After Alan.

That must have been spooky.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, is it?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh I thiught it was

$ make love. $ I don't know how to make love, sorry.

[Huge]

Anthea was a rather attractive (at least so far as I recall) post-grad who did support in the computer lab. The command "enter {subsystemname}" was a KOS (Kent On-line System) command to run a subsystem. Hence the rather juvenile "enter anthea" and the corresponding error message.

Sun seem to have broken that;

[huge@anubis ~]: make love make: Fatal error: Don't know how to make target `love'

Humourless gits. They've taken the joke out of the tunefs man page, too. No wonder their share price is down the toilet.

[Bob Eager]

and frighteningly intelligent

That actually predates UNIX make. It was a shorthand command on TOPS-10 (early 1970s) to invoke the editor to create a new file. And that's what it said! UNIX make just nicked it!

I'd forgotten about that one. Still there in FreeBSD...for the benefit of readers...

" You can tune a file system, but you cannot tune a fish."

[The Natural Philosopher]

I cannot remember where that particular anecdote comes from. Possibly a C cross compile system with a 3rd party make.

Or perhaps some wag had patched make and recompiled it themselves.

The more amusing thing one used to do was to start a little program on someones terminal at lunch, that presented a login prompt.

On any login/password it would spool the entire file of text errors to the bemused and panicky user...

Id forgot that one.

I remember a phone call 'what does 'indirection error in line 57 ' mean

"It means you haven't paid me for a new demonstration copy'

That was the same d*****ad a friend of mine did some embedded sofware for.. on a telephone system..it took over a year before a bored receptionist noticed that every hour on the hour it flashed up 'scientists say no to SDI' on the LCD panel ..;-)

..then was the apocryphal story of a Johannesburg IT firm whose program crashed periodically once a year..in Durban,.. It took three years before it was realized that the programmer dispatched to fix it was keen horse racing follower, and the failures always coincided with the main race of the year....

I believe he was fired.

[Andrew Gabriel]

% got a light? No match %

% man: why did you get a divorce? man:: Too many arguments %

% ping elvis elvis is alive %

a20% "How would you rate Brown's incompitence? Unmatched " %

There are several more historic ones I have which no longer work due to changes over the years (mostly improved error messages), like the make love/make war ones.

Of course there are always those who think unix isn't sexy, but they've simply never spend a night in /bin...

look chat touch unzip head finger nice yes expand mount vgrind fsck eject more yes fsck eject umount sag zip sleep

[Huge]

And every network should have a machine called elvis for this very reason.

[PCPaul]

You can still create a file called 'readme' in someone's home directory containing just the text: "readme: No such file or directory" for hours of fun...