lied@ihlts.UUCP (Doctor Bob) (05/11/84)
Well, it's been a quiet week in net.wobegon. The weather warmed up real nice here the last week or so, and you could certainly tell. All around the apartment complexes, you could see the Norwegian bachelor hackers taking out their grills and hibachis, getting their hands all full of charcoal dust and lighter fluid. They're always happy to see this time of year, because it means they don't have to use dishes anymore. The first rule of housekeeping for the Norwegian bachelor hacker -- the only rule, as a matter of fact -- is "Maybe it'll go away." Even when they're barbecuing, they leave the grill outside, hoping that wild dogs will come by and lick it clean, I suppose. Over at Wally's Tap, the old guys were sitting around discussing their first IBM systems. Telling stories about adding by table look-up, and hooking up scopes to the program counter. They all look at each other sort of knowingly, and one of 'em will start up with "Oh, ya, I remember dat old 1620..." "...oh, ya, ya, remember how long it took to add 10,000 digit numbers?" And then they're off. The younger guys just sort of sit and grin. They know better than to ridicule those old stories. They're thinking, "Boy, what a bunch of junk! Can you imagine paper tape? Adding by table lookup? Can you believe that?" But deep inside, they know that it isn't so silly. Quite a few of them remember card punches all too well. And they know that in a couple of years, they're gonna be drinking Wally's beer, saying things like, "Oh, ya, I remember that old UNIX. That was how many thousand lines of code?" "Oh, ya, good old BSD..." And their eyes will get a little glassy, and they'll go back over hours of rogue and bugs in vi. The classical music society finally got their own group. Everyone could see it coming for quite a while now, but apparently no one in that group would take it upon themselves to create the group. Just a bunch of shy people I guess. "No, no, thank you. We'll just not read any of these articles, and, well, no, I don't think I'll post this article. Thanks anyway." But their shyness sure disappeared fast when they got in amongst their peers, so to speak. One hundred and fifty eight articles in the first week. Very few people thought they had it in 'em, but there they are. There are a lot of people like that in net.wobegon. You never seem to hear anything from them, but they're there. They log in to their machines late at night, and they check to see if there's any news. And they think, "I have something to say about that article in net.religion," or net.politics or net.flame. And then they think, "Naaah, it's not important." And they log off and go to bed, leaving the grill out on the porch waiting for wild dogs. But maybe they really did have something to say. Something of earth-shaking clarity, something so profound that it will change the lives of their readers forever. We'll never know. That's the news from net.wobegon, the little group that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve; where all the women are handsome; and all the children are above average.