Conference thebay::joyoflex

    interrupt, negate, violate, jam, pre-empt ...

    Maybe instead of 
    
    $ PURGE *.LIS   !!!!!!
    
    we could encourage 
    
    $ fade_away_gradually *.lis ! please ?

    My dictionary points to a Latin derivation for "purge" - to cleanse.
Not too bad.
    On the other hand, "delete" seems to come from L. _delere_ - to destroy
(strangely, "deleterious" is said to derive straight from the Gk _deleterios_,
with no Latin intervention).
    On the whole, though, I think *I*'d care if I was "deleted", but I don't
think magnetic bits care whether or not they are "violenced".  As a result,
I don't give it a passing thought that a little DCL verb terminates the
effective life of a specific aggregation of 1's and 0's.  Call me heartless,
if you will, just don't call me Shirley.

Surely you must be joking...  -But seriously, call me whacky but I 
take a rather strange, tingly pleasure in imagining the sound of 
thousands(K's) of tiny little death cries, coming from binary digits,
dying under the automatic weapons fire invoked by the DELETE command.

Actually, the point is mewt as deletion only removes the pointers to the 
data, not the data itself.  Sort of forcing the bits to roam nameless in
the digital continuum, being thought of as garbage, sleeping on steam 
vents and the like...

But on to more substantive matters.  MY contribution to the topic at hand!
How about:

	%COPY-E-PENETIN, error penetrating [filespec] as input
	-RMS-E-DFM, directory lookup FAILED miserably
	-SYSTEM-F-LINKEXCITE, network partner excited   (BOIIING!)


howzat?

rgdz,

    re:.4
    
    *Now* how do you expect me to sleep nights thinking of all
    those poor little data wandering around carrying all their
    worldy bytes in shopping bags?
    
    --- jerry

    And.. to add insult to injury we use GARBAGE COLLECTION to locate those
    poor wandering bytes so that we can rehabilitate them to become
    productive members of society again!

... they can't even afford two bits for a cup of coffee.

    In the 'Good Ol' Days' of punched cards, we simply dropped the
    discarded bits into the bit-bucket.
    
    (One day a neophyte programmer saw field service working on the
    machine and asked if he could see where the bit-bucket was.  We
    showed him the bin which collected the chips produced by the card
    punch and I don't think he ever realized that we were pulling his leg.)  

Yeah, I remember people reviewing the TOPS20 documentation.  Various
commands talked about

	"...memory is destroyed by this command"

Some reviewers suggested that users might be afraid to use the command.

(I think we changed it to "...memory is cleared by this command" or
somesuch)

/Eric

    And what about "bomb", "crash", and so on? Digital tries to avoid
    this hyperbole with euphemisms such as "bugcheck" for "Crash!" and
    "system dump" for "crash dump". My Atari micro just displays a little
    row of graphic Guy-Fawkes-style bombs on the screen when it goes
    on holiday. Count the bombs and work out what the problem was!
    
    Some terms understate the situation, though. My favourite is the
    VAX BASIC error:
    
    		Program lost - sorry.

re .-1    
	"My favourite is the ..."
	
If you are into 'favourite error messages' my all-time favourite is the
RSX-11M error code:

	IE.NFW		-69		Path lost to partner
	
How did it ever get released?

	Steve

    On the subject of error messages, two from Pascal compilers spring
    to mind:
    
    	Error near PROGRAM
    
    	Syntax error
    
    Bur even better, from the antique ICL 1900 Algol 60 compiler (I
    once turned down the offer of being no 2 on their team):
    
    	Imposs happened [followed by a dump of some registers and other
    	imformation]
    
    Later this was replaced by
    
    	Error 294, the compiler has become confused by a previous error
    
    Mind you, I wasn't entirely blameless: DEC-10 Algol 60 once produced
    
    	Error found where an error was expected

    I like the idea of lots of little bytes roaming nameless in the
    continuum. Continuing from that it is kind of hard to visualise
    what actually happens when you copy a file to, say, a node in America
    from Europe. I imagine this little collection of bytes, all excited
    about going on holiday, getting into the car to be sent off to the
    States. I suppose that on a secure network they would travel in
    Volvo estate cars. Hmmmmm. A nice thought anyway.
    
    
    			Ian.

    re: putting bytes in cars...
    
    Do the excess bytes go by cdr?

    	I've heard it told that the COBOL compiler on the 10's used
    to give up with the message:
    
    		"Catastrophe in Phase E"
    
    							--Doug

    	Back in the days when DEC used to give away software, there
    was a piece of laboratory software, which if left running continuously,
    every couple of days would produce the message :-
    
    "I am the demon glitch. Catch me if you can".
    
    	Both the message, and the code to print it, were generated on
    the fly, so it was quite difficult to catch.

    If there are *MANY* excess bytes, they go aboard Amtrak's
    cdadddaaadaar-Liner.
    
    howzat?
    
    rgdz

    Re: .13 [Copying a file from Europe to America...]
    
    I don't see the trip to America as one being that pleasant.  I believe
    it's more like being herded into a coax cable and being shot out
    into space, sucked into a satellite repeater, then shot back to
    earth, etc.  A rather traumatic experience!  It's a wonder that
    we don't have more casualties along the way!
    
    Roy
    

    > I don't see the trip to America as one being that pleasant.  I believe
    > it's more like being herded into a coax cable and being shot out
    > into space,

    Ah, you've obviously flown from London, Gatwick. (A driverless monorail
    takes you out to the terminal).
    
    Jeff.

    Hmmmm. Shot into space, sucked into a satellite repeater, shot back
    to earth. You mean they go on a sort of roller coaster trip on the
    way. Gosh, we don't half put these poor wee bits through hell 8^}.
    Perhaps we could start a campaign for the protection of harassed
    bits. Or even one to ensure the laying to rest of nameless bytes.
    Surely, after all they've done for us......
    
    
    			Ian.

    
    In Texas, the oil business is dominant.  Consider a recent Texas
    Instruments computer (don't know which model) which, when the
    operating system crashes, says "Shut her down Clancey, she's a-pumpin'
    mud"
    

    A long time ago I used to work at the notorious University of Essex.
    They had a Data Bank (it got burned down - but that's another story).
    One of their publications had an unfortunate misprint - "magnetic
    rape" instead of "magnetic tape". The prof of English Lit later
    immortalised this with the line "and we've debugged magnetic rape,
    in laying little bits on tape".

    According to my dictionary, protocol means, "The ceremonial forms
    accepted as correct in official dealings, as between heads of state
    or diplomatic officials".
    
    According to my learned colleague, in the computer biz protocol
    means, "The form of stuff between things".
    
    Spd

Can't resist the opportunity to throw in a couple of my favorite error
messages.

A friend had the DECSIM simulator emit
	"Too complicated to explain."
I rather like its
	"Unexpected system error."
DECSIM may have expected an error, but I sure didn't!

But my all-time favorite, for which I've lost the complete text, came from
SUDS (schematic capture system).  I was running over my complete drawing set
doing something to each page, but unfortunately had not told it to clear
each drawing as it finished with it, so after about a dozen pages the
drawing in memory was getting BIG.  It finally quit, blanked the screen, and
produced a centered message of about 12 lines that started
	"Your over-bloated design has exceeded the puny amount of core
	available to it on this misbegotten system..."

*sigh*