[talk.bizarre] History: foo and fubar are unrelated

mikep@ism780c.UUCP (Michael A. Petonic) (10/27/87)

In article <1322@husc2.UUCP> chou@husc2.UUCP (luyen chou) writes:
>In article <7640@ism780c.UUCP> mikep@ism780c.UUCP (Michael A. Petonic) writes:
>>with each key not located adjacent of each other faster than I can type
>>``asdf''.    I've noticed that people around here usually use
>>``foo'' and ``bar'' more for example data types than filenames.
>
>
>The bet is on.  I always use "thid" since I've found that two hands are better
>than one.
>--Luyen Chou
>The Harvard Core Corps


Right.  Except in this case.  I can arrange my fingers of my left
hand so that it takes one motion for me to hit a-s-d-f.   That beats
both ``ffff'' and ``thid''.  Try it, if you're skeptical.  The
4-f sequence needs 4 motions to produce (also leads to a possibly
confusing situation:  ``Is that 8 f's or 9?'').  Likewise,
``thid'' needs four contacts, although it's probably a lot quicker
than ``ffff''.  I can see where an experienced THID typer can
approach the speed of an experienced ASDF typer, but never surpass
him.  Unless of course, the guy only had two fingers on his left
hand, then there might be a chance.

However, if you're skeptical, you can fly out here and we'll test
it.  Both on the same terminals (not the paper-tty types) and we'll
see.  Should come in the summer, though, many more sights...

-MikeP
{sdcrdcf|attunix|microsoft|sfmin}!ism780c!mikep

ps - notice that this is crossposted to talk.bizarre and
followups are directed there.  It hasn't gotten wild enough
to go into alt.flame, but we can keep on trying.