The Burroughs OS (“Master Control Program”) in the 70s had a routine from which all other processes were started. Its name was MotherForker(). It was eventually renamed when HR found out.
Definitely. The OS, HW and Extended Algol had some nice features that were ahead of their time. I haven’t kept up, but their mainframes were very popular with banks etc.
No, “Human Resources” is an accurate description of the view a company’s senior management has of its workers. Something to be used up and then discarded, like a cartridge of printer toner.
They are doing a bit of that as well. Though Talent Retention is more of a job for line management.
A big part of HR is ass covering for the company. And I don't say that (purely) in a negative way: it is good and important for companies to have a structure for you to raise certain complaints independent of your line management.
Just keep in mind that HR's loyalty is to the company. Not to you nor in general your line manager.
There are some fun entries there for hex values used as magic numbers.
Apple have some great ones used in their crash report exception types - 0x2bad45ec (too bad for sec) and 0xc00010ff in the event of being killed for overheating.
The manual has a diagram of a FET (field-effect transistor) with the source, gate, and drain. Someone wrote on the diagram: Nixon FET. Economic Drain. Water Gate, Unimpeachable Source.
References to Watergate are ubiquitous (especially thanks to the angle journalists like to take on the current US president) and it was probably mentioned in history classes in school too at some point. I know it's supposed to be part of the curriculum in history classes in some German-speaking countries.
Granted it might not be familiar to someone from a non-western country though.
Yes, it is. Not everyone can see well enough to read text in images. For those who have that difficulty, describing the content of an image enables enjoyment of a joke that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Many people may not be aware that Twitter allows you to put alt text on an image so people using assistive technologies can get a description of the image. I encourage people to use this feature.
It's too bad their implementation of the feature is so poor [1], requiring it to be first enabled via accessibility settings [2] that most Twitter users probably never look at.
Yep. I was going to take a potshot at Twitter about how they must be feeling some competitive pressure from Mastodon if they need to rip off features, but it looks like Twitter has actually had this feature since some time in 2016, and I'm not sure when Mastodon added it.
Either way, anything that makes Twitter a little less awful is nice to see.
Many years ago, in a previous life, I heard about the ~friendly competition between Caltech's Dabney and Flemming houses. Various spacecraft components would have "DEI" (Dabney Eats It) or "FEIF" (Flemming Eats It Faster) hidden on them. But there's apparently nothing online about that. Or at least anything that's indexed.
Legends of Caltech, page 69 has the story and a photograph (looking at my copy right now). It was a valve package plate on the Voyagers ink-stamped with “DEI/FEIF”.
Yes, this was IBM's symbol for a FET. They had their own nonstandard symbol for bipolar transistors too, three stacked boxes labeled N, P, N, with a triangle on the emitter. (See page 1-4 of the document above.) IBM also had their own logic gate symbols: an OR gate looked like an AND gate, and an AND gate looked like an op amp.
I came across the FET joke while looking up IBM transistor symbols in response to TubeTime's thread on the history of transistor symbols (which is an interesting thread you should read): https://twitter.com/TubeTimeUS/status/1249023089528078337
IBM used all sorts of non-standard terminology of their own. You'd hear their folks seriously talking about PELs instead of Pixels ("Picture Elements"); and DASDs (pronounced "dah-z-dee") instead of disks ("Direct Access Storage Device"). Not clear if it was intentionally designed to be alienating to outsiders, but it sure seemed cultish.
I think several factors led to IBM's non-standard symbols. The standards didn't exist at the beginning, so different companies used different things. IBM also had historical baggage, wanting to stay consistent over time. In some ways IBM's symbols were better, for instance making NPN vs PNP obvious. Finally, IBM was big enough that they could do their own thing and train their own people.
Tektronix, longstanding producer of high-end electronics testing and measurement equipment, used to be heroes at both drawing beautiful schematics as well as adding silly little easter eggs to them. Some samples: http://turingbirds.com/temp/tek-datasheets/
Well, it's another piece of evidence to support the hypothesis that our parents and grandparents had modern human-like qualities. Don't discount it: these theories proceed by slow aggregation of data, not one big-bang discovery.
Now come on, 1971 wasn't all that long ago. I got married for the first time that year. My car at the time had a rotary engine and it cruised at 85mph on the road every weekend. Did I mention that fuel was 31 cents a gallon? (And that was classed as expensive.)
Interestingly the things you mention do make it sound like a different era. Many millennials don’t drive, don’t know what fuel costs today, and have no idea what a rotary engine is. The American fascination with cars probably peaked around 1971.
>The American fascination with cars probably peaked around 1971.
that's an interesting question. cars/motorcycles/fast things were a huge box-office theme in the 90s and 2000s, with many franchises featuring car thieves, enthusiasts, and racers -- but the same trend was around in the 70s.
If one generalizes social direction by using box office themes as an indicator, like plenty of people (probably unwisely) do, it's a tough question.
Sports car sales, a decent indicator of automotive interest due to their singular purpose nature, were higher in the 90s and 2000s than the 70s.
Just as a singular example, take the Corvette[0]. A practically useless car for anything but enthusiasts, sports driving, and status. It sold 21 thousand units in 71, and 53 thousand units in 84. If that's any indicator, the peak must've been past 71, at least, albeit that's a fairly weak indicator given the gas crisis a few years later that spurred most folks away from anything with a big engine.
Cars are still a huge status symbol for the rich, famous, and successful. Millenial-aged rappers are still buying Lamborghinis.
To be clear : I think you're dead-on correct that millenials are driving less, but personally I think that means more about millenials lack of financial mobility more than it does the failure of the automobile to allure current generations.
I would like to see a cite for the claim that fewer "millennials" have driver's licenses and/or cars than the equivalent age group in 1971. I am skeptical.
> About 87 percent of 19-year-olds in 1983 had their licenses, but more than 30 years later, that percentage had dropped to 69 percent.
> Drivers in their 20s, 30s and 40s also saw their ranks fall as a percentage of their age group population since 1983—down about 13 percentage points for those in their 20s, more than eight percentage points for thirtysomethings and nearly three percentage points for those in their 40s.
An aside but I’ve always found that turn of phrase bemusing. The right word is “can’t”, nobody says “I don’t swim” or “I don’t wire a plug”. It’s like people realise that it’s something they ought to be able to do and are deficient in it.
There are also urban dwellers who can drive, hold a license, but don't own a car due to cost or space issues.
Undoubtedly more common in Europe - lots of Londoners don't own cars because there's nowhere cheap to park at either end of a trip, the traffic is bad, and the public transport is usable.
American history in the US, maybe. Rest of the world probably doesn't care - and if a typical history class is like all my classes in primary, secondary and high school, you barely reach World War II when the school year ends.
I would argue that Einstein's relativity theory is the biggest event of said century, that shaped the world in more ways then the two world wars did. Also, speaking of wars, I'd say the 3rd one, the Cold guy, is a bigger event then those 2.
And for that matter, not that exciting either. So someone scribbled something in the manual.. what next, can I say I found an Anti-Trump joke in the Constitution, after I print a copy and scribble something on it?
