mohan@ihuxf.UUCP (Mohan Palat) (10/08/85)
I had a strange dream last night ...
I dreamt that this world had been taken over by UNIX hackers.
They made radical, sweeping changes in every sphere of human life.
For example, a human being would henceforth be called a "process",
and each one would be given a unique process id, instead of names.
A woman giving birth to a child would be called "forking a child"
and all the maternity wards would be termed "forking wards".
A natural death would be called an "exit"; an abnormal one would
be termed "interrupt". Law enforcement agencies would use such
commands as "find" and "grep" in their daily business. And spy
agencies like CIA would make extensive use of commands like
"crypt" and "adb".
Budget and other resources would be allocated by governments using
the "malloc" command. Motor vehicles would be known as "devices"
and the driver of a vehicle would be called a "device driver". Buying
and selling articles would use the "chown" command.
A national league would be formed for the game Hack. It would be
called NHL (National Hack League).
A direct 9600 baud link would be established between Kremlin
and Washington and each head of state would use the "write" command in
case of an emergency. All newspapers would be abolished and the
netnews would become the primary source of information.
By the way, the heads of state would be called "system administrator".
And finally, God would no longer be referred to as Lord or God.
Instead, He would be called either "Superuser" or "Root".
And oh, what is a nightmare without Jerry Falwell. He was no longer
talking about the threat of communism. Instead, he was talking
about Unix-ism. Because of its use of commands like "kill" and
games with names such as "rogue", Unix was morally corrupt, according
to Dr. Falwell.
... like I said, it was a strange dream.
MOHAN PALAT ("just slightly ahead of our times")
AT&T Network Systems