Ένα μικρό μέρος απο ένα παλιό hoax email.

"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T

Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of

Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were

impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished

reading 'Bored of the Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great

Tolkien 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of

the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the

operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be

as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users' frustration

levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque

allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal,

called 'A'. When we found others were actually trying to creat real programs

with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL

and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:



for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);



To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such

a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this

to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years.

Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying

to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to

generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological

parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the

general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been

working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and

feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that

have resulted from our silly prank so long ago."

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Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people.