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  fortune index  all fortunes 
  
 |  |  | #2061 |  | One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is...  If they do foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little.
 -- Joe Martin
 
 |  |  |  | #2062 |  | One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
 Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago.
 Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our
 VAXs are going for UNIX use.  UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand,
 easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual
 users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines.
 And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it.  We have
 good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
 It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run
 out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end
 up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
 With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly
 check that small manual and find out that it's not there.  With VMS, no matter
 what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if
 you look long enough it's there.  That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX
 is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there.
 -- Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984
 [It's been argued that the beauty of UNIX is the same as the beauty of Ken
 Olsen's brain.  Ed.]
 
 |  |  |  | #2063 |  | One person's error is another person's data. 
 |  |  |  | #2064 |  | One picture is worth 128K words. 
 |  |  |  | #2065 |  | Only great masters of style can succeed in being obtuse. -- Oscar Wilde
 
 Most UNIX programmers are great masters of style.
 -- The Unnamed Usenetter
 
 |  |  |  | #2066 |  | Only the fittest survive. The vanquished acknowledge their unworthiness by placing a classified ad with the ritual phrase "must sell -- best offer,"
 and thereafter dwell in infamy, relegated to discussing gas mileage and lawn
 food.  But if successful, you join the elite sodality that spends hours
 unpurifying the dialect of the tribe with arcane talk of bits and bytes, RAMS
 and ROMS, hard disks and baud rates. Are you obnoxious, obsessed?  It's a
 modest price to pay.  For you have tapped into the same awesome primal power
 that produces credit-card billing errors and lost plane reservations.  Hail,
 postindustrial warrior, subduer of Bounceoids, pride of the cosmos, keeper of
 the silicone creed: Computo, ergo sum.  The force is with you -- at 110 volts.
 May your RAMS be fruitful and multiply.
 -- Curt Suplee, "Smithsonian", 4/83
 
 |  |  |  | #2067 |  | OS/2 Beer: Comes in a 32-oz can. Does allow you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously. Allows you to drink Windows 3.1 Beer simultaneously
 too, but somewhat slower. Advertises that its cans won't explode when you
 open them, even if you shake them up. You never really see anyone
 drinking OS/2 Beer, but the manufacturer (International Beer
 Manufacturing) claims that 9 million six-packs have been sold.
 
 |  |  |  | #2068 |  | OS/2 Skyways: The terminal is almost empty, with only a few prospective passengers milling
 about. The announcer says that their flight has just departed, wishes them a
 good flight, though there are no planes on the runway. Airline personnel
 walk around, apologising profusely to customers in hushed voices, pointing
 from time to time to the sleek, powerful jets outside the terminal on the
 field. They tell each passenger how good the real flight will be on these
 new jets and how much safer it will be than Windows Airlines, but that they
 will have to wait a little longer for the technicians to finish the flight
 systems. Maybe until mid-1995. Maybe longer.
 
 |  |  |  | #2069 |  | "Our attitude with TCP/IP is, `Hey, we'll do it, but don't make a big system, because we can't fix it if it breaks -- nobody can.'"
 
 "TCP/IP is OK if you've got a little informal club, and it doesn't make
 any difference if it takes a while to fix it."
 -- Ken Olson, in Digital News, 1988
 
 |  |  |  | #2070 |  | Our documentation manager was showing her 2 year old son around the office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we were both
 holding bags of popcorn.  We were both holding bottles of juice.  But only
 *__he* had a lollipop.
 He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?"
 Her reply: "He can have a lollipop any time he wants to.  That's
 what it means to be a programmer."
 
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