jeffw@tekecs.UUCP (Jeff Winslow) (04/08/84)
An open letter to Gary Benson:
Oh, come now! The fact that the article appeared on April Fool's Day
was hardly the only indication it was a joke. kgbvax? kremvax? Chernenko
actually use a terminal? Do you really believe all that? Would you like
to buy some desert land?
The article did exactly what an April Fool's joke is supposed to do -
make a lot of people act like fools, if only for a few minutes. They have
no one but themselves to blame for their gullibility and the phone bills.
But I can understand your (and their) reaction. People hate being made to
look like fools.
To whoever - Congrats for a job well done!
nothing personal -
Jeff Winslowron@brl-vgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (04/09/84)
Hey guys, I don't know where NSAVAX is, but NSA-11/70 is called TYCHO and is on IMP 57 on the MILNET. -Ron
jsq@ut-sally.UUCP (John Quarterman) (04/10/84)
One of Tycho's aliases is NSA, and IMP 57 itself is known as NSA.
Difficult to find....
--
John Quarterman, CS Dept., University of Texas, Austin, Texas
jsq@ut-sally.ARPA, jsq@ut-sally.UUCP, {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!jsqjmrobson@watdaisy.UUCP (Mike Robson) (04/11/84)
April fool's day an American institution?!?! Come off it. Mike Robson, Uni of Waterloo. (neither American nor Canadian but able to appreciate an April fool like kgbvax)
toby@felix.UUCP (04/12/84)
Didn't anybody who fell for the joke notice that the PHONE NUMBER given in the article was also 840401 ? Toby Gottfried FileNet Corp., Costa Mesa, CA
jaap@haring.UUCP (04/13/84)
>... April Fool's Day is, admittedly, an American institution, but it >seems to this writer that one desirable side effect of the net >is that national peculiarities may provoke the thought of people >in other nations. .... Everyone here learns the following riddle: Op een april verloor Alva zijn bril. (Before everybody spends to much time looking for his dutch to english dictonary, translation: On the first of april, Alva lost his glasses. Of course glasses is the translation of bril). What happened a couple of centuries ago was, that Dutch patriotic freedom fighters (Geuzen*) overtook the place Den Briel on the first of April, using a kind of Trojan horse trick. (Alva was the Spanish supervisor, trying to rule the Low Lands (De Nederlanden) for the Spanish king). So this small event in history is always explained to me as the starting point for april fool's day (een aprildag). It might be a nationalistic view, but patriotism is a peculiar thing. To place this into some historic background, New York was still called Nieuw-Amsterdam, and if the republic of the Low Lans didn't lost this war against England, so had to give swap Nieuw Amsterdam to (like it is called now) Suriname, you would probably have learned the same in school, and I wouldn't need to translate the Dutch to you ... :-) Jaap Akkerhuis * See net.wines about Geuze