COMPUTER LEGENDS, STORIES AND JOKES - AND OTHER
===============================================
mainly from the book, the devouring fungus.
Some of this storys is may not true but they are good anyway.
[digital edition by .loucephyr 22nov97 and 02feb98]
Besök Den Phetaste Sidan: www.phetast.nu
Stories from the wery early, early and not so early days.
This is a story from the really early days:
Once a power plant kept shutting down and they contacted
Thomas Edisons' competitor, Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
He told the generator personell to set up a cot and a
pillow by the main generator. He showed up with a piece
of chalk, lay down on the cot, adjusted the pillow and
closed his eyes.
"Allright turn on the generator" he said. The generator
rumbled into life. After a few seconds, Steinmetz said,
"Allright, turn it off" He got up and went to the generator,
marked a panelwith the chalk, and told the plant engineer,
"The Coil inside this panel is owerwired. Remove about
fifteen feet of wire, and your problem is solved".
They followed his instructions and solved the problem.
Steinmetz then gave them a bill of $10,000. The plant
managers' face flushed purple as he exclaimed
"How can you stick us with such a huge bill for doing
allmost nothing" then Steinmetz replyed
"A nickel of that is for the chalk, the rest is for
knowing which panel to mark.".
One story about Albert Einstein goes:
Einstein was at on of those agonizing coctail
parties where everyone tries to make conversation,
but no one's really interested in what anyone has
to say, because they'd all rather go home but
can't admit it. The hostes was trying to draw him
out of his shell by striking up a dialogue.
"What do you do?" she asked.
"I teach mathematical physics at Princeton," he replied.
"I took a math course once, back in high school," she said. "I
studied geometry."
"Oh," he asked, "plane geometry?"
"I don't know," she responded in bewilderment. "Is there a
fancy geometry?"
Grown men banged their heads on desks and cried.
Admirals dissolved into khakied masses of
frustration. Finally, naval brass visited the
office of the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener.
A top-secret computer he designed was on the blink,
stranding a battleship in the middle of the pacific.
Would he help?
While the described the problem. Weiner lanced his
fingers behind his head and closed his eyes, leaning
back in his chair. He thought for a moment, then said,
"Remove the computers' T12X panel. Behind it
you will find a wire eaten through by a mouse,
change the wire".
The navy men eyed each other, then turned again as
Wiener cleard his throat.
"It will be a gray mouse, I belive." he added.
Having no other choice, they radioed the ship with
Wieners instructions. Three hours later the ship
radioed back,
"Panel removed. Wire replaced. Problem solved.
Note: the mouse was gray."
Annother story is about Seymore Cray, the creator of the
Cray computer.
Company managers for a firm that owned a Cray computer called
him to complain that it kept malfunctioning, that thay couldn't
figure out why, and that the problem had brought the company
to a standstill. Cray visited the company computer room,
listened as the engineers described the computers' glitches,
and ordered everyone out. He then locked the door and sat down
on a stool for two hours and twenty-six minutes. Finally he
emerged from the room, pointed to the computers schematic,
said, "Change this wire" and returned to his home in Chippewa
Falls, Minnesota. The engineers followed his advice, and the
machine worked.
At the height of the Cold War, President Dweight Eisenhower
secretly visited the Pentagon. He was there to confront the
result of a classified undertaking requiring the efforts of
dozens of military engineers for over a year. They'd built
a warehouse-sized computer whose memory embraced all the
military, political, cultural, social, and scientific data
in the world. The computer would make the Pentagon aware of
everything from the latest troop movements in East Berlin to
the smallest skirmish in Syria. A general invited Eisenhower
to question it.
"Who's the most influential Communist agitator in Vietnam?"
he asked.
"A northen province revolutionary named Ho Chi Mhin,"
it replyed.
Encouraged, the president asked, "What is the next continent
likely to have serius Communist insergency?"
"Asia followed by South America"
The wise response put Eisenhower in a good mood.
"What is Khrushchev's shoe size?" he asked.
"Nine and a half, wide." the machine answersed.
The president concluded on a whimsical note.
"Is there a God?" he asked.
The mainframe rumbled, then roared, "There is now."
Johnny Von Neuman, the designer of the modern computer,
had a impresive ability to find the solution of complex
mathematic problelms. In one story he's asked the following
problem:
"Two trains comming at each other at x miles
an hour, and a bird flies back and forth
between them. If the trains start at y miles
apart, how far does the bird fly until it's
squashed"
Von Newman instantly responded with the right answer.
"Wery good!" his friend said "You know, most
people don't figure out the shortcut to
solving that problem, Instead they go
through the long process of trying to sum
up the infint series."
Confused, Von Newman replied, "But thats what I did."
Allan Turing was a practical who lived on the Spartan side,
but his view of practicality might strike other people as
strange. For instance, he and a friend hit upon the perfect
way to use those precious moments in chess during wich one
waits for the opponent to make his move.
They decided to combine chess with running. As soon as a
player made his move, he had to run a frantic lap around the
garden. If the other player hadn't made his move by then, the
runner got an extra move. Of course, running too fast could
leave a person so oxygen starved that he couldn't think, which
would even bungle even a free move, so the runner had to maintain
a delicate balance between running like the wind and not getting
winded. It is perhaps the only form of chess thats builds up
thiers calves.
Turing grew intrigued with sharpshooting and decided he wanted
to learn how to use a rifle, but to get rifle training he was
required to join the Home Guard, whose officers were fond of
holding pointless marching exercises that Turing expected he'd
find unexciting. Though he didn.t se any point in bumbling
about the information, he still filled the recuitment form.
However, he paused when he came to the question:
"Do you understand that by enrolling in the
Home Guard you place yourself liable to
military law?".
He saw no good in agreeing, so he wrote "No".
He went into training and endured the parades long enough to
beacome an excellent marksman. Having masterd what he wanted
to learn, he stopped showing up for drills, to the consternation
of his commanding officer. The officer sought up Turing out and
demanded to know why he wasn't showing up for drills. Turing
replied that he didn't feel for it, since he'd already learned
how to shoot a rifle.
"It's not your job to decide whether or not you'll attend drills"
the commander yelled. "You're a soldier! You'll do what you're told"
Turings reply was something to the effect of "Oh, I don't think
that I'm a soldier really". This galled the officer, who decided
threats would work when orders failed. "Don't you realize that you
are under military law?" he snapped "You must do what you're told,
or face the consequences.".
Turings' reply was something like "Oh, I don't think I'm military
law, really."
"What do you mean?" the officer roared "You signed the form! Why, I
Have your papers right here!" And pulled them out, took a look, and
got a suprise.
The head command decided thet Turing was "improperly enrolled" and
wasn't part of the Home Guard, really. That got Turing of the hook.
A incident at an Air force base in the early seventies:
The command headquarters was replacing old mainframes with the
latest electronics. The new system worked fine at first, then
crached. Engineers probed the new mainframe but couldn'r find the
problem's source. They restarted it, and it ran fine - for a few
days. Then it crached again; they still couldn't find the bug.
This expensive, exasperating, and mysterious glitch remained for
months, ruining elaborate programs that had to be started over again.
Major S., who headed the computer operations, now found himself the
center of unwanted attantion. His boss, the colonel, attnded all the
staff meatings and whenever the system crached (which happend every
few days), the colonel's superior made him painfully aware if the
inconvenience the craches were causing. After each staff meeting,
the colonel always paid a call on Major S. to be sure Major S.
appreciated the colonel's unhappines.
Major S. told the computer operators to call him immediately when
the system went down. A few days later, they called him, and he ran
into the computers room. He heard an odd, oscillating hum at the end
of the room and went to investigate, looking down a row of disk drives
to see a technical sergent buffing the floor with en electric floor-
polisher. The major's eyes followed the polisher's cord across the
floor to where it diappeared into the open cabinet door of one of the
new disk drives, where it where plugged into one of the auxiliary
power receptacles.
"How often do you buff this floor?" he asked.
"Every few days, sir" replied the sergeant.
"Do you always plug the machine into this receptacle?"
"Always have, sir."
They brought the system up and watched it crach again as soon as
the sergeant sqeezed the handle on the polisher. He'd found the
problem, but the major still had the delicate task of telling the
colonel that month of being in the hor seat and thousands of hours
of lost work were due to a sergeant polishing floors. A friend of
his watched in apprehension as the major left to tell his superior,
and was suprised when he returned an hour later, smiling.
"Did you tell the colonel?" the friend asked.
"Sure."
"Wasm't he upset?"
"Nope"
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him that it was a buffer problem."
There's one story about a DEC operating system that could get caught
in a continuous loop if the programmer didn't runa fault check.
Anticipating the posibility that the computer's mini-universe would
fall into chaos if its human master didn't watch it, the original
programmer wryly commented in the code, "The death of God left the
angels ina strange position."
The lights faded. The crowd hushed. Four thousand people jammed
the aufitorium. The air was hot and ripe with the press of so
many bodies. all silent, all waiting. It wasn't a theater, but a
international symposium on human speech, and they strained
forward to see the breakthrough - a computer that could translate
any language into English, construct a response, and reply back
in the original tounge.
The curtain rose on a clowing steel-and-glass machine the size of
a refrigerator. Three visitors chosen randomly from the audience
spoke to it.
"Good morning," said a swede in her language. "Please estimate
the the number of people in this room."
The machine paused, then replied in a soft, hollow voice,
"Good morning to you. Unfortunately, such estimate are not within
my power. I'm only a translator" The crowd laughed.
An African philologist asked in Swahili, "Do you feel peculiar,
beeing on display?"
"Not at all." it said. "That is part of my function."
Then a Turk asked, "How are you?"
The computer shuddered as it repeated in Turkish, "How are you?
How are you? How are you" faster and faster, until suddenly, both
voice and lights went dead. Four thousand people gasped.
The computer's programmer had not anticipated that the Turkish
greeting "How are you?" is literally translated as "What is
what is isn't?" This simple paradox proved to be more than the
computer could handle.
In the 1950s the U.S. Department of Defence tried to invent a
English-Russian translator, but the result wasn't what they
hoped for.
English Russian Literal
proverb Translation retranslation
The spirit is Spirt khoroshij, The liqour is OK
willing but the a myaso plokhoi. but the meat has
flesh is weak. gone bad.
Out of sight, Nevidno soshyol Invisible idiot.
out of mind. s uma.
Similar deformations occured in English-French translations,
"The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" became "The wine
is good but the meat is rotten" and "Out of sight, out of mind"
became "Blind, insane".
Jokes and stories that origin from MIT.
In the days when Gerry Sussman was a novice,
Marvin Minsky once came to him as he was hacking
at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?" asked Minsky."
"I am training a randomly wired neural
net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
"Why are the net wired randomly?" asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions
of how to play."
Minsky shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?" Sussaman asked his teacher.
"So the room will be emty." Minsky replyed.
At that moment, Sussman was enlighted.
(a garbage collector is a technique for cleaning out
program functions that waste time and space.)
One day a student came to Dave Moon and said,
"I understand how to make a better garbage collector.
We must keep a refernce count of the pointers to each
cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said, 'I understand
how to make a better garbage collector..."
What Moon meaned with this what that the students method
would creat a infinit loop.
A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was
eating a his morning meal.
"I would like to give you this personality test," said
the outsider, "beacuse I want you to be happy".
Drecher took the paper that was offered and put it into
the toaster, and said.
"I want the toaster to be happy to.".
One of the hackers at MIT had constructed a robot arm that
played ping-pong, using a PDP-6 and a camera. Once when
Marvin Minsky watched the robot in action he stepped into
the robotarms reach. Due to the refection of the camera lamp
in Minskys glasses (or bald head as some says) the computer
misstook Minsky for a great ping-pong ball and nearly
decapitated him.
Once they were cleaning up one of our old computers, the
AI lab PDP-10, and they opened doors in the computer that
hadn't been opend f”r years. This thing's been around for a
long time. One of the maintance staff saw a switch that
said "MAGIC" in one position and "MORE MAGIC" in the other.
What's this? Nobody knew.
So he said, "Let's find out," threw the switch, and the
system crached.
"Oh, my God, I wonder what's going on?" he said and started
trying to figure it out by tracing the switch's connection.
He managed to get to the back of the PDP-10 and found the
that the switch was hooked on one side to a ground wire and
on the other side to a wire that just dangled in the air.
Magic had been building up in the switch all those years.
The switch dosn't do any more.
About IBM:
IBM, what DOES it stand for?
I've Been Moved
In Bleakest Mordor
Immense Blue Mountain
I'm a Big Mother (fucker?)
Itty-Bitty Machines
Install Bigger Memory!
International Bit Manglers
It's Been Malfunctioning
You hade to punch a time-clock when you worked for IBM
in those days. You had to punch in at 9.15 or you were in
trouble. So everybody typically punched in at 9.14. I was
a commuter at that time, and my train came in so that I
did that pretty regulary. I arrived just in the nick of
time. After we'd been in the building on 56th Street for
a while, I noticed that when I came, everybody, was
there - and apparantly been there for some time. This
practice went on.
I finally discovered the reason for it. Someone confided
in me that across the street from our building was an emty
lot and behind that was the back of an apartment building.
In one of the apartments lived a young woman who slept
without any clothes on. She used to get up in the morning
and dance wery exuberantly for a while before going to work.
So that was a period of great productivity beacuse averybody
came in very early and the show was over after a while, and
everybody settled down to work long before starting time.
but then we moved to other buildings. The first one we
moved to overlooked the dressing rooms of the Jay thorpe
department store. The we moved to another building that
overlooked the dressing rooms of Bonwit Teller. For some
peculiar reason, people spent an awful lot of time at the
windows, and during this period our productivity seemed to
decline considerably. Finally we wound up in a building
that had no view at all.
Other hackles rise over IBMs' dress code for men, wich produces
employees who look as if they'd been cut from the same cokie cutter
and dressed by the same tailor from the same bolt of blue cloth.
The legend of Big Blues' famous mens' dress codes - dark suit, dark
tie, white skirt, short hair, and until recently, no beards or
mustaches - is that is was born in a bank.
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., who took over IBMs' helm when his
father retired, was allegedly visiting a bank that was a
major customer. He was in a elevator eith the bank president
when a rotund man dressed like the worlds' most famous clown
got in with them, wearing a screaming paisley tie, bright
red plaid jacket, and black-and-white striped pants.
The IBM CEO and the bank CEO stood in disaopproving silence
until the man got off and the elevator door closed again.
Watson then turned to the president and asked, "How can you
let a bank employee dress like that?"
The banker smiled and replied, "He's not one of our employee.
He's our IBM representative.".
IBM enployees also have a reputation for humorless efficiency. But that
isn't really true. At least one former IBM employee recalled when a
coworker reacted wtith wit in a tense situation.
When I worked at IBM, I knew an engineer who had worked at
a particular defence plant for ten years, going to work
through the same security gate each day. Over this gate was
a large sign stating:
IT IS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW TO BRING ANY OF THE
FOLLOWING INTO THIS FACILITY:
CAMERA
RECORDING EQUIPMENT
RADIO
One day, he was walking through the gate and his beeper went
off. The guard jumped off his stool and shouted, "Stop! What
was that noise?".
He responded, "Only my beeper.".
"Is that a radio?" the guard said.
The prudent answer would have been "no", but the engineer,
beeing a defender of truth, answerd, "Well, yes, it is".
The guard pointed to the sign, said, "Can't you read? It's
forbidden to bring a radio through this gate", and confiscated
the beeper. The engineer tried to reason with him, but saw it
was hopeless.
So, the engineer walked a few paces off, stopped, pulled a pen
from his pocked, carefully removed the cap, and, speaked in a
low voice with his mouth close to the tip, said, "They took my
radio.".
He got into a lot of trouble...
Thomas J. Padula of princeton Univercity heard a story about a Caltech
student who bragged to IBM that he could program a IBM PC-XT to destroy
itself. IBM executives replied that if he could do that in front of
witnesses, they's give him a free new PC.
The day of reckoning came, and so did IBM. The representatives gave the
student a PC-XT and sat down to watch. He turned the computer on, inserted
a disk, and leaned back. Soon the machine started violently shakingm, then
came sound of crackling circuitry, smoke poured out, and the powersupply
shot down. He's destroyed the machine.
The program the student had runned caused the diskdrive to spinn forward
and backward in a tremendous speed, cousing the mainboard to bend loose
ciruits that shortwired other circuits, and then the whole computer
crashed down into little pieces.
Q: How many IBM field service reps does it takes to change a tire?
A: Two. One jack the car upm and the other to swap out tires until
they've found the one thats flat.
Q: Qhat do IBM servive reps if they can't find the tire thats flat?
A: They replace the generator.
Lightbulb jokes:
Q: How many members of the USS Enteprise does it take to
change a light bulb?
A: Seven. Scotty will report to Captain Kirk that the light bulb
in the engineering Section is burnt out. Bones pronounces the
light bulb dead. Scotty discovers they have no more light
bulbes and complains he can't tend to his machines in the
dark. Kirk makes an emergency stop at the uncharted planet
Alpha Regula IV to procure a light bulb from the natives.
kirk, Spock, Bones, Sulu, and two security officers beam
down. The natives immediately kill the security officers
and take the rest captive. Meanwhile, back in orbit, Scotty
discovers an approaching Klingon ship and warps out of the
solar system to escape detection. Bones cures the native king,
who's suffering from the flu and needs a shot od epinephrine.
As a reward the landing party is set free and given all the
light bulbs they can carry. Scotty cripples the Klingon ship
and returnes just in time to beam up the landing party. They
insert the new bulb, and continue with their five-year mision.
Q: How many software engineers does it take to screw in a
light bulb?
A: None, it's a hardware problem.
Q: How many hardware engineers does it take to screw in a
light bulb?
A: Eighty. One to hold the light bulb in place an sventynine
to rotate the ceiling.
Q: How many database people does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three. One to write the lightbulb removal program, one to write
the lightbulb insertion program, and one to as a light bulb
administrator to make sure nobody else tries to change the
light bulb at the same time.
Q: How many IBM reps does it take to change a light bulb?
A: One hundred; ten to do it, and ninty to write document
number GC7500439-0001, Multitasking Incandecent Source
System Facility, of wich 10 percent of the pages state
"This page intentionally left blank.".
Six phases of a Project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Nonparticioants
A man how's heard that computers know everything ask one:
"Where's my mother, Mary Jones?"
it replies, "She is in a kitchen in Baltimore makeing a
sandwich." He's impressed because the computer's right.
He then asks, "Where's my father, John Jones?" The computer
takes a few seconds and says "Your father is in Main, fishing."
"Aha!" the man says, "You're wrong, John Jones, is in Washington
, D.C., at a conference." the computer takes a few more seconds
before saying "That's true, John Jones is in Washingtom, D.C.,
at a conference, but your father is fishing in Maine."
EDP Position Descriptions:
Data Processing Manager:
Leaps tall buildings in a single bound,
is more powerfull than a locomotive,
is faster than a speeding bullet,
walks on water,
gives policy to God.
Ass't Data Processing Manager:
Leaps short buildings in a sigle bound,
is more powerfull than a switch engine,
is just ass fast as a speeding bullet,
walks on water if the sea is calm,
talk to God.
Senior Systems Analyst:
Leaps short buildings with a running start
and favorable winds,
is almost as powerfull as a switchengine,
is faster than a speeding BB,
walks on water in an indoor swinginpool,
talks with God if special request is approved.
System Analyst:
Barely clears a Quonset hut,
loses tug of war with a locomotive,
can fire a speeding bullet,
swims well,
is occasionally addressed by God.
Lead Programmer:
Makes high marks when trying to leap buildings,
is run over by locomotives,
can sometimes handle a gun without inflicting self-injury,
dog-paddles,
talks to animals.
Senior Programer:
Runns into buildings,
recognizes locomotives two times out of three,
is not issued ammunition,
can stay afloat witha life jacket,
talks to walls.
Maintenance Programmer:
Falls over doorsteps when trying to enter buildings,
says, "Look at the choo-choo",
wets himself with a water pistol,
mumbels to himself.
Programmer:
Lifts buildings and walks under them,
kicks locomotives off the track,
catches speeding bullets in his teeth and eats them,
freezes water with a single glance,
he is GOD.
This is all I had time and patiense to do,
if you got more fun legends please send
them to me at louie@phetast.nu
[ Your memory in the great river called Time ]
Besök Den Phetaste Sidan: www.phetast.nu