> The entire structure would be in constant flux, rotating, morphing, and rearranging itself into novel patterns never before seen, hinting at the unimaginable depth of intelligence operating within.
The problem was that there was no interactive
computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi-
nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported
upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was
meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there
were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower
case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The
resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer
that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three
boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long
and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and
the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.
>Methane on Mars is expected to have a rather short lifetime – around 400 years – because it is broken down by ultraviolet light. Atmospheric mixing (for example, by winds) should quickly lead to a more or less uniform background concentration. But previous observations hint at seasonal variations in methane abundance, with concentrations varying with location and time. If this is correct, there must be an active source to replenish the supply and, at the same time, a relatively quick way of removing it in order to account for the apparent rise and fall in the measurements.
> Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for 'Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.
> In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete * $ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported * $ not found, assuming you meant 'delete * '. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.
> The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete * $ twice.