• new arrival (unregistered)

    can't wait for more. thanks for the write-ups ellis!

  • (nodebb)

    Much better multi-part stories than the old Hanzo/Mercy/Sergio crap years ago.

  • dusoft (unregistered)

    Keep 'em coming!

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered)

    "I saw line after line of an archaic programming language that the Egyptians might’ve used to build the pyramids." - Was it APL?

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    Ah to be young and full of vigor and stupidity.

  • Steve (not that one) (unregistered) in reply to Officer Johnny Holzkopf

    "Was it APL?" Nah. If it were APL it'd be a single impossibly long line.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Steve (not that one)

    "Was it APL?" Nah. If it were APL it'd be a single impossibly long line.

    And it would be in Greek, not Egyptian.

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    You'd think so. But as always it's complicated.

    Basically, if you look at the earliest pyramids they were all built using CTOS and later KILN operating systems imported from Sumeria. The systems were based off cuneiform and writing them involved carving your code into a tablet roughly 3x2 cubits and having an unpaid intern (I think that's the PC term for slave these days) carry them up the side of the Zigurat to sun dry. KILN later improved that by adding support for a wood fired thermal compiler.

    That is why they look kind of wonky. Like stepped pyramids and such. KILN in particular was really good at building steps but it was built around the square as its base so didn't really work well with triangles.

    Later on the Egyptians started rolling their own code after which I kind of lost track with the technology. But I know they basically had their own tech stack by the 4th Dynasty. I had a coworker back in the day who moved to Egypt to work on porting DOOM to what ever OS they were using and I remember him constantly complaining about having to carve things into stone instead of clay.

    Greek only came into the picture very late and mainly out of necessity as by the time of Homer the Egyptian tech industry had gone the way of Eastern Block computers. They basically over invested into stone carving and completely missed the rise of alphabet compilers.

  • Hmmmm (unregistered)

    An IP conflict between a printer and a glitchy HR application lead to confusion and chaos. PHB's stand in the way to righteousness. Will the narrator take the promotion after Aggie's death??? Find out next week on another very special episode of thedailywtf.

  • John (unregistered)

    This is why we use DCHP and DNS

  • John (unregistered) in reply to John

    ...DHCP

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Is this some sort of soap opera? If not, it's an awfully pointless shaggy dog story. Not what I come here to read.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Chris

    Be glad it's not the Erik Gern stories of yore.

  • (nodebb)

    I like the way the story spends a whole paragraph explaining what an ip address is to an audience that probably already has a working understanding of theIP protocol.

  • Allen Gould (unregistered) in reply to Hmmmm

    "The promotion will follow, as soon as the next performance review comes around!" means that you'll be transfered the headcount and the work and the responsibility (but not the authority), and then next performance review there will magically be no money for that promotion, because everything is working just fine as is isn't it? And some exec will pocket your raise as a cost-savings bonus.

  • (nodebb)

    Usually when everyone gets together in a conference room, it means layoffs are coming. That's what I was expecting, really.

  • 516052 (unregistered) in reply to Worf

    I was half expecting to hear that the old manager had been let go for allowing the OP to cause a disturbance.

  • NeuroticNetwork (unregistered) in reply to 516052

    Loved this, thank you :)

  • (nodebb) in reply to 516052

    This reminds me of a story I read in Analog back in July 1982. "Glossolalia", by Arlan K. Andrews, Sr., from the July 1982 Analog. Tells the story of the Tower of Babel as if it was a huge waterfall-style IT project ... or at least the information management side of building the Tower. Included puns:

    • PHORTRAN was a langauge .. the PH stood for Phonecian
    • hard discs were cuneiform tablets
    • floppies were papyrus
    • physically transporting floppies was called the T Carrier system
    • a stack of tablets falling over was called a disc crash of major proportions
    • the line "using the old standard of 8 bites = 1 meal" was used in quantifying (in kilobytes) the amount of work the scribes were doing
  • No (unregistered)

    Most pointless thing I’d read on here in years

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    Speaking off. It's a somewhat known fact that the earliest alphabetic programing languages originated as far back as the Phoenicians with experiments dating back much further. So how come we only hear about it from the Greek period? The answer might surprise you.

    The big advantage of alphabetic programing languages is that they use ink as the medium rather than tablets of clay or stone. This means they make it much easier to produce very long and complex software. There is just physically less labor involved. And as is the case today, when you give people tools to make things bloat they will. Combine that with the fact early APLs were all interpreted and I think you see where this is going.

    Bottom line is that the hardware of the day just was not up to the task of keeping up with the bloat. So you'd spend your afternoon making your perfect little software that can do everything twice and wash your dishes while its doing it. And when its time to play the thing starts executing in minutes per command rather than commands per minute.

    It wasn't until Archimedes invented his screw and water cooling became viable that they could make alphabetic machines fast enough to actually run anything but the simplest of toy projects. And it wasn't until Romans reintroduced the Compiler in the form of ESC (enslaved scribe compilation) that things really got going.

    In fact, one of the main reasons for why the Roman conquest of Greece went as smoothly as it did was because the Romans had all their software precompiled back before the invasion which meant they could just hit run. While the Greeks were still relying on obsolete interpreted scrolls that had to be analyzed by an integrated philosopher each time you needed something done.

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    On a related note the great fire in Alexandria was in fact a case of one such early Alphabetic machine overheating and setting the whole library on fire. From what I heard someone tried running the game of life on it and forgot to turn it off over the weekend.

    And yes, you can bet your keyboard that execs used it as an excuse to stick to clay for far longer than they should have. The more things change the more they stay the same.

  • (nodebb) in reply to 516052

    Similar to the great Tower of Hanoi DDOS attack of 437 BC?

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    At this rate I am tempted to start a blog for these stories. Since I have a whole notebook worth of them.

  • Strahd Ivarius (unregistered) in reply to 516052

    CTOS? That is something I didn't hear about since the previous millenium... What about BTOS?

Leave a comment on “The Easy No”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article