|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and appreciation of the language on Usenet. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
An INTERCAL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.ccil.org/retro. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
interesting adj. In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of 'annoying', or 'difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times". Oppose trivial, uninteresting. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Internet n. The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. With TCP/IP and DNS in place. It was around this time |
|
|
|
|
|