In honor of the day, I really thought about posting my Masters Thesis. But it’s too long, and any way, it is copyright UCLA. So, instead, some classic stuff that only transitfan would remember.
Item The First: Hail 360 Child of Evil
Hail 360, Child of Evil, for Thy misdeeds we curse Thee. Verifly, do we curse and condemn Thee; We call down the Wrath of the Heavens upon Thee.
Know, Three Sickly, that we hate Thee with a Pure and White-Hot passion. May all the Microseconds of Thine Existance be eons in Misery. As Thou pushest about the Bits of Thy Programs, may the 1-bits cause chills and may the 0-bits itch, and may Thou be in continual Torment. As Thou miscomputest the problems of Thy Users may every Man’s hand be turned against Thee. May children cast Card Chad at Thee and call Thee cursed.
May Thy insulation all evaporate and Thy ROS become writeable; and may a User write his FORTRAN program all over it.
May Thy printers Rewind; and Thy tapes Unwind; and Thy memory banks grow Senile; and Thy drums be Out of Round; and Thy high-speed channel be Multiplexed with Thy reader/punch; and may Thy Channel Programs loop.
May Thy bits all have three states.
May OS have 100 Releases, and may each release have 5000 APARS. May each APAR have 100 PTFs, and may each PTF be punched Off-Register on Warped Cards. May each PTF have 100 Hex patches, and may each patch grow scar tissue.
May each Release require ten SYSGENs, and cost a Shift, and may each Shift be Billed at Prime Rates.
May Thy Wait State ABEND; may Thy SVC’s get protection violations; may Thy SPOOL overflow, may Thy DATA UNIT cut in and out. May Thy Adder drop its seventh Bit, and may Thy Multiplier compute Cube Roots. May Thy Move-Characters instruction complement every Third Bit. May Thy Floating-Point registers be where Thy Fixed-Point registers should be.
A Pox upon Thee and upon Thy kin: upon Thy mod 44’s and upon Thy mod 91’s and upon Thy mod 67’s. Yea, upon Thy children and Thy children’s children, even unto the seventh Generation of Hardware.
Yea, 360, know that Thou shall be sorely afflicted. From this time forth shall Thy Peripherals become independent Processors and shall THou be synchronized with the low-speed printer. And Thy Cores shall be as dust within Thee and in Sorrow shall Thou lament Thy lot.
Mary Shaw (Datamation, 4-1-1971)
Item the Second: Sysabend Dump
On either side the printer lie
Fat stacks of paper six feet high
That stun the mind and blur the eye.
And lo! Still more comes streaming by.
A fresh SYSABEND dump.
Ye printer clacketh merrily.
“Complecious code is 043”
Alack! What can the matter be
That made SYSABEND dump.
My TCAM hath no MCP?
My data cannot OPENed be?
Consult my neighborhood SE?
The devil take thy dam and thee,
Thou vile SYSABEND dump.
Assemble modules on the fly
And link for yet another try.
With SUPERZAP a patch apply
This time: THOU SHALT NOT DUMP
…
On either side the printer lie
Fat stacks of paper twelve feet high
That blow the mind and plast the eye.
Gadzooks! How shrill yon varlet’s cry
As sixteen megabytes go by
In yet another dump.
J.C.L. Guest. DATAMATION. 4-1-1975
Item the Third: Stupid Peoples Court
Quoting from the SPC page: Many years before any of you (other than Hubert Humphrey, Rich Rosen or Gene Spafford) were born, there appeared a series of humorous articles in net.flame under the title “Stupid People’s Court”. These articles, for reasons unknown to historians and other people of Good Taste, created quite a following, such that SPC (as the court transcripts are knows) was able to escape the destruction of net.flame by being rocketed to Earth in a tiny Internet Packet. Due to its infrequent appearances, however, SPC was lost in the high signal-to-noise ratio of rec.humor and talk.bizarre, and hordes of pleading fans asked me to start a mailing list so that they wouldn’t miss new episodes. Thinking there might be some money in it somewhere, Judge Moriarty Wapner, the author, obliged, but discovered that after a year, the subscription list had climbed to an extremely high readership, somewhere around the current number of Democratic Presidential candidates. The list’s maintenance was murder, so the judge asked if he might get his own little moderated SPC newsgroup on news.groups. Luckily, SPC was mistaken for “Superconductor-Powered Concubines”, and a large percentage of soc.misc voted the group into existance.
The court has been closed since 1988, but here are some links to some better transcripts:
- The Case of the Rampant Knuckleheads (September 1985)
- The Case of Outraged English Majors vs. The Net (March 1985)
- Net.flame Public vs. Assorted Religous Zanies (undated)
- Stupid People’s Court At the Movies (May 1985)
- The Advertising Industry (August 1985)
- Jerry Falwell (September 1985)
- Saturday Morning Cartoons (October 1985)
- Marvel Comics (November 1985)
- SPC warning in net.rumor (May 1986)
- 60 Minutes Special Report: The Demise of Stupid People’s Court (December 1986)
- And Now… Letters to Judge Wapner (October 1987)
- Celebrating the 5th Anniversary of the KILL File (October 1987)
- Live from the Oval Office (December 1987)
- rec.humor.spc is Up on the Roof… (February 1988)
Boy, I do wish the judge would come out of retirement.
