[net.followup] Re. etymology of foo

halle1@houxz.UUCP (08/31/83)

I always thought that foo came from the punch line of the old, well known
joke, who's punch line includes a spoonerism of "if the shoe fits".

cfh@cca.UUCP (Christopher Herot) (09/02/83)

The IBM 1130 (actually one of the first personal computers) used
to indicate errors by pausing and lighting up the hex digits
F00n in the console lights.  One looked up n in the list of
"foo" errors to find out what went wrong.  I believe this goes back
to the days when Edson DeCastro was still at DEC.