An Act of Cod, or was he merely in the wrong plaice?
There's something fishy going down in the computer lab
Welcome to Who, Me? The Register's headlong plunge into the pit of reader recollections and confessions. Today's story takes us back to the glory days of the early 1990s when our hero (at least until he made a nuisance of himself) "Cliff" was coming to the end of his schooling. The 8-bit generation had very much passed into …
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Monday 13th January 2020 11:01 GMT Tom 7
Re: Lucky git
Where I worked we had a Vax/VMS and the early word processing had a big dictionary to do 'spell checking' or some fangled thing. A program called crunge appeared which took a document and replaced random words with words that were somehow similar. A crunged document often made more sense than the original (we were mad boffins at the forefront of our fields and often didnt understand our own work). Better still a crunged document could be sent in 'by accident' to reveal bosses who had even less of a clue than normal. Once you've found out someone doesnt read your reports you are effectively untouchable!
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Monday 13th January 2020 20:54 GMT Stoneshop
Re: Lucky git
A program called crunge appeared which took a document and replaced random words with words that were somehow similar
One fine day, or rather night, in the late 1980's our secretary decided it would be fun to not only type the meeting minutes in WordPerfect as usual, but run its spill chucker over it and replace any word not in its dictionary with the first suggestion. This was a record library I was volunteering at, and as with any non-mainstream meeting minutes it was replete with domain-specific jargon. Which WP was totally unfamiliar with, resulting in predictable and often humorous large-scale mangling, and presented at the next meeting.
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Monday 13th January 2020 08:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
History
Back in the early 1990s a relative applied for a senior technical position at Microsoft. After seeing around the place he turned it down because he thought they would soon be out of business because they had no concept of security and no concept of structured APIs.
He was of course right, he just didn't realise it would not stop them.
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Monday 13th January 2020 09:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
stupid
"Enthralled with his newfound powers, Cliff did the obvious thing and created a macro that would would find and replace "the" in documents and replace it with "tuna" on saving. "
Why, oh $DEITY, why did he do something that stupid ??? I can't even fathom this ...
Did he think about also jumping out of the window and killing himself ? Would have been more productive ...
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Monday 13th January 2020 10:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
We used to hook *KEY 10 on the BBC-bs at school to OLD| RUN so every time you pressed the break key it would restart the previous program instead of exiting to the prompt. Pretty handy when debugging.
But when the last program messes with the prompt, captures all keyboard input and outputs messages from ghosts, teachers freak out.
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Monday 13th January 2020 11:11 GMT Jaspa
PASCAL
Ahhhh PASCAL, heady days indeed .
After beavering away on a serial comms app that utilised (iirc) a 20x2 LCD display to display the chat, I clicked compile and nipped out for a beverage (damn those 286s were slow.)
Returning to the Lab my fellow students were eager to test so we ran a cable along the length of the room with my fellow (g1ts) Students gathered at the opposite end.
After a few hiccups the LCDs sprang to life and as a group of late teens and early 20s do, we started to exchange "pleasantries" via our new toy.
While trying to think of ever more effective put downs I failed to notice the crowd of Senior Uni Staff gathered around me.
Long and short of it, the prospective new Head of the Electronics Faculty was mildly amused by the childish messages, our Lecturer was slightly less impressed.
Still got a distinction however, just :)
Thumbs up as the code worked like a dream.
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Monday 13th January 2020 12:30 GMT Antron Argaiv
Microsoft's cash cow
from TFA: "...what would become Microsoft's productivity cash cow..."
I respectfully submit that you have included an extra word in the phrase above.
"Productivity", in my experience, has very little to do with Microsoft Word.
Else, why would they change the UI every couple of years? Come to think of it, that applies to pretty much all their products, which seem to have reached "peak function" many years ago and are now being plastered with essentially useless "features" and "design changes" which add little but clutter to the UI.
Monday Microsoft rant over, please continue...
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Thursday 30th January 2020 19:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
lol
our test meeting room in the legacy domain was room 666 the cupboard of evil.
in a project call an exchange guy in new global corp post takeover burst out laughing reviewing it post domino to exchange conversion....
wasnt till he laughed room 666 both myself and my boss realised it was still live......oops! Id bulk converted all the resourcing and didnt notice that the boss had forgotten to delet that one beforehand...
teehee, and anon for a reason ;) still there (room also) old boss is too, diff teams now.
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Monday 13th January 2020 14:26 GMT Annihilator
"so that the document always looked ok on screen"
Unless the document legitimately contained the word "tuna" in it. Presumably they were replaced with "the" upon loading.
I wonder also if he was smart enough to consider spaces before and after, so that words like "thesaurus" and "lathe" weren't converted to "tunasaurus" (a fishy sounding dinosaur..) and latuna.
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Tuesday 14th January 2020 18:12 GMT Venerable and Fragrant Wind of Change
tunasaurus and latuna. Similar principle to filters that have problems with Scunthorpe and Penistone, but a bit of novelty. Anyone want to parse psychotunarapist?
The story says early 90s. So regexps to make it easy existed, but weren't quite so widely-known as they became when the Web - and with it Perl - went mainstream.
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Monday 13th January 2020 14:51 GMT Frank Bitterlich
Bones and Cookies...
Probably around the same time as this tale occurred, a friend of mine got a copy of ResEdit into his paws and was thrilled to find out that you could alter all kinds of menus and alerts both in applications and the OS on the Macs of the newspaper he worked for. So the most logical thing was to spend multiple hours to work through all resource forks he could find and replace the work "file" with "cookie", and "folder" with "bone."
At that time, data between the machines was mostly exchanged by floppy (well, rather "stiffy") disks. I still don't know how it happened, but soon after, the madness spread to other machines, more and more eventually asking stuff like "Are you sure you want to copy this cookie into this bone?" Took a lot of effort to clean that up, but it was really funny. Especially seeing him try to explain that to the boss...
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Monday 13th January 2020 17:35 GMT swm
2's and 3's
Working on the Dartmouth time sharing system we noticed that all input characters were converted to an internal representation and vice versa on output. So we changed the tables so 2's were converted to 3's on input and output. People would type programs with line numbers 1,2,3,4 but this was sorted to 1,3,2,4.
Our plan did have a hiccup when we mapped 2's to 3's and realized that we couldn't input a real 2 for the next mapping. So we mapped a to 2, 2 to 3, and 3 to a.
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Monday 13th January 2020 20:44 GMT LeahroyNake
Loved mine
I was very fortunate to receive a second hand Amiga 500 for Christmas plus quite a few copies of Amiga format and some coding manuals. I had great fun playing Zeewolf and typing out lots of code including the REM /comments (I didn't know any better at the time lol) in blitz basic.
Qbasic several years later while bored during the fire service strikes on a monochrome laptop (seriously skint) I wrote playable versions of pong and then arkanoid (that's a massive step up in complexity). Few years later spot the difference game then a really crap command and conquer rip off with a map editor (how else do you make the map).
Now I do professional services work and spend most of my time trying to make documentation and statements of work fool proof... For actual fools I. E. The REM parts :/
I miss my Amiga.
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Monday 13th January 2020 21:14 GMT Ribfeast
Re: Loved mine
I still have two Amiga 500s in the shed, I pull them out for nostalgia from time to time. Have a few boxes of game disks etc. All still working, surprisingly.
They have the 1 meg upgrade, external floppy drive and the composite video output adaptors too, so I have them hooked up to an old LCD TV.
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Tuesday 14th January 2020 07:01 GMT Slipoch
Ahh the joys of substitution
I once did something similar but at a much lower level in the pre-word days.
I reprogrammed the keyboard mapping on boot, so that some letters were whole verbs and others nouns and then joining words like and and the and a.
So someone would type in 'the' and would get something like 'yabbie pumps anonymous', someone would type a sentence and look up to see 'what you enjoy are yabbie pumps after dark with goat hampsters'
They never caught me.