Thursday, May 27, 2004
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Mr. Question answers, "What is a Mailer Daemon?"
Irving "Mailer" Daemon was a former WWII destroyer captain who, while down on his luck roaming the waterfront in Monterey, CA, found an antique cannery tool that was worth $1,000. He gave most of it to Gary Kildall, a Navy chum who taught computing at the nearby Naval Officers Postgraduate school and who had this idea to start a Pacific Grove company called Intergalactic Digital Research that made computer horoscope machines. Eventually Digital Research (they dropped "Intergalactic") designed compilers and a computer operating system called CP/M (Control Program/Microcomputers) which became very popular for business microcomputing; DR did very well until the day that Gary decided to go play golf and make the IBM guys who flew in from Florida wait; they figured Gary wasn't interested and so they flew up to Seattle to talk to Bill Gates about this new computer they were working on, the "PC". Irving was pretty unhappy with Gary and for three years afterwards sent him every day a brown golf ball via U.S. mail. Finally he met his untimely demise one evening while drinking near the Aquarium; he accidentally dropped his bottle of Wild Turkey in the middle of the street, and while bending over to pick it up he was hit by a Budweiser truck.
Irving "Mailer" Daemon was a former WWII destroyer captain who, while down on his luck roaming the waterfront in Monterey, CA, found an antique cannery tool that was worth $1,000. He gave most of it to Gary Kildall, a Navy chum who taught computing at the nearby Naval Officers Postgraduate school and who had this idea to start a Pacific Grove company called Intergalactic Digital Research that made computer horoscope machines. Eventually Digital Research (they dropped "Intergalactic") designed compilers and a computer operating system called CP/M (Control Program/Microcomputers) which became very popular for business microcomputing; DR did very well until the day that Gary decided to go play golf and make the IBM guys who flew in from Florida wait; they figured Gary wasn't interested and so they flew up to Seattle to talk to Bill Gates about this new computer they were working on, the "PC". Irving was pretty unhappy with Gary and for three years afterwards sent him every day a brown golf ball via U.S. mail. Finally he met his untimely demise one evening while drinking near the Aquarium; he accidentally dropped his bottle of Wild Turkey in the middle of the street, and while bending over to pick it up he was hit by a Budweiser truck.
An oldie: Halt and Catch Fire: "Halt and Catch Fire, known by its mnemonic HCF, denotes any of several undocumented and semi-mythical computer machine code instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as IBM System 360.
The Motorola 6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up due to bus contention.
See also: killer poke"
The Motorola 6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up due to bus contention.
See also: killer poke"
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