Thursday, March 27, 2008

TODAY'S TWD: GENERAL REFERENCES

My fellow Iddiot Brian-El [aka Uncle Brian] sent me this snippet from Wikipedia yesterday:

Easter eggs found in some Unix operating systems caused them to respond to the command "make love" with "not war?" and "why" with "why not" (a reference to _The Prisoner_ in Berkeley Unix 1977). The TOPS-10 operatingsystem (for the DEC PDP-10 computer) had the "make love" hack before 1971; it included a short, thoughtful pause before the response. This same behavior occurred on the RSTS/E operating system where the command "make" was used to invoke the TECO editor, and TECO would also provide this response.

The episode from 'The Prisoner' which was referenced was "The General", in which a computer was able to imprint whatever information it wanted onto the cortex of the human brain. It began as a learning tool, but it could be used to control the minds of an entire population or to turn the people into an army of zombies.

BCnU!
Toby OB

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