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Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: 'I understand how to make a better garbage collector '"
[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves.] |
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In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?'', Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened. |
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A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning meal.
"I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "because I want you to be happy."
Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster, saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too." |
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This story says a lot about the ITS ethos. |
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On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science (and at IBM too) OS means 'operating system', but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant 'output spy'. |
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