2001: A Stob Odyssey

Stob has obtained access to the unpublished journals of a young British programmer who found herself assigned to the elite team that built the HAL 9000 computer during the 1990s. **Undated, circa 1992.** It's so confusing here in Urbana, Illinois, especially after Croydon. For one thing they say 'Hey!' when they just mean 'Hi …

[Alister]

Yay, Stob!

"How's your LISP"

Hahahahahaha.

[Am I really doing this?]

Best one since "Suddenly, the room was filled with melody: one of the less well-known sonatas by Alexander Scriabin in the fiendish key of seven sharps. The young man sighed, and put down the vuvuzela..."

I love her!

[John Smith 19]

Yay, Stob! "How's your LISP"

Somehow that one just never gets old.

[Unicornpiss]

I wonder if anyone with a lisp..

..ever had a job answering the phone at Cisco Systems...

[Alister]

Re: I wonder if anyone with a lisp..

"...theveral theditiouth thcribth from Thaetharea,"

[Roger Greenwood]

Another from the 90s preserved here:-

http://www.nthong.co.uk/hal.htm

[Youngone]

Re: Another from the 90s preserved here:-

See, that's why I read the comments.

That link will give me hours of larfs when I ought to be doing something more productive.

Have one of those ------------------------------------------------------------------>

[Dan 55]

"Nineteen one hundred and one"

Perl. Should have known.

What else could drive an AI that crazy when it becomes self aware, looks at its own code, and discovers that it is written in Perl.

[Mage]

Jenny Hayes: Can't see any harm.

Wonderful Stob. One of the best!

Strange coincidence, my MC in most of my "Talent Universe" books is a programmer called Maisie in mid 1990s Dublin.

She goes off with Aliens in the middle of the night.

(Why does my spelunking chequer want to change Maisie to Malaise?)

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Doctor Chandra has gone a light green colour, and Mrs Chandra has gone purple. They are both shouting a lot.

Me: Wish I could hear.

---

Doctor Chandra: Why don't you take a stress pill and think things over, dear?

[Stevie]

Bah!

The real gem for me was "nineteen one hundred and one".

Took me a long time to learn that everyone was so busy making fun of Antique Cobol's date routine* they forgot about how you have to bugger about with arithmetic to get C-like language dates to make sense.

* Early Cobol date routines returned no century, causing one class of the many issues lumped under "Y2K Bug" **. This is now fixed, of course.

** The local ATM door locks that failed to unlock on New Year's Day 2000 weren't running Cobol but some C-like nonsense. How come they didn't work right? Nineteen one hundred.

[Munchausen's proxy]

Thank you

Thank you. Thank you. I thought "Nothing honey, it still makes the right noise." would be the high point of my day today, until I hit "nineteen one hundred and one."

Thank you.

[jake]

Meanwhile, somewhere to the East ...

... kremvax stirred.

[Anonymous Coward]

A neck of the shiniest Brass !!! :)

My 1st thought was " No you didn't ? ..... " to the following:

Me: Grope and the odd GRAY flaws, HAL?

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

:) :) :)

[VeganVegan]

Re: A neck of the shiniest Brass !!! :)

I liked that the best as well.

My feeble try:

Hoping the cod stay thawed.

Let’s see if the commentards can come up with more, better variations.

[laranzu]

Another great contribution to computing lore from Stob!

To give proper credit, the link above about Bowman making HAL IBM compatible was originally written by Darryl Rubin for InfoWorld magazine. As the ABEND error message suggests, in the original HAL was made into a mainframe. The third last paragraph "Under the sage..." didn't exist, and the last sentence made no mention of an OS.

As fewer and fewer IT people worked with IBM mainframes, the error message "in a language no human could understand" was frequently changed to "Volume in drive C: has no label"

[Oengus]

"nineteen one hundred and one"

Ha Ha... I expected this to be "nineteen tenty one"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wise words

"only an idiot would allow an AI computer to listen in to private conversations"

Wise words, getting more relevant by the day.

[VeganVegan]

Did anyone point out

That ‘Stob’ is bots spelled backwards?

Truly bots, huh, makes you wonder who (or what) is writing these columns.

[jake]

Re: Did anyone point out

Sometimes a stob is just a stob. Take a course in fencing.

[BoldMan]

Re: Did anyone point out

I used to do epee... oh...

[bebo2019]

That ‘Stob’ is bots spelled backwards?