BAMBOO LOVES THE FAB 5D2!

David Nebenzahl wrote,on my timestamp of 25/02/2011 11:21 AM:


computer would dutifully reply with, "That command cannot be
completed." Finally, at wit's end, he typed, "Screw you!"

The computer answered, "Ready."

Never get in the way of a good urban myth...

Well, that part is not urban legend; probably happened just as related.

No it didn't. "scr" is not the abbreviation of any recognized command in vms,
it'd never return "Ready".


Reminds me of the mainframe I used as a student back in the 19-ought-80s, a
Honeywell DPS-8. Some of the OS code was obviously written by wisenheimers. I
remember writing FORTRAN programs with "GOTO" statements in them (The horror!).
If you named the target of the GOTO statement "JAIL" (hence "GOTO JAIL" in the
program), when you executed (ran) your program, the output printout would
respond with:

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

(I guess this is what's technically called an "Easter egg", no?)

Yup. In Unix and Linux, there used to be a command called "mt", for "magnetic
tape". Used to do things like rewind tape, forward it one file mark and so on.
If you typed a wrong set of options, like:

"mt -reality"

it'd reply back with:

"Don't grok reality"

(google grok)