“Here’a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.” 25th anniversary
Posted by jpluimers on 2020/06/24
Today 25 years ago: [WayBack] Dilbert Comic Strip on 1995-06-24 | Dilbert by Scott Adams
Wally approaches another employee and says, “Hold it right there, buddy.”
Wally continues, “That scruffy beard . . . those suspenders . . . that smug expression . . .”
Wally concludes, “You’re one of those condescending Unix computer users!”
The man responds, “Here’a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.”
It was a play on the tiny Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer fragment from [WayBack] single.h:
#if _FP_W_TYPE_SIZE < 32
#error "Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer."
#endif
Not much has changed for Dilbert, apart that by now, the transcripts have been put on-line, something I wanted to do some 15 years ago with OCR.
Seems somebody did it, and made it official too. Woot!
On the computing side, we still seem to be well in the 64-bit era, just like when I posted 20 years ago today: Here’s a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real computer.
I wonder that really has changed in the past 5 years, and how long the “here’s a nickel” will stay relevant.
Via these tweets that helped me remind to post:
- [WayBack] Kristian Köhntopp auf Twitter: “If it is not Linux, it is broken. If it is not Bash, it is broken. This is 2019. Grow the fuck up.… “
- [WayBack] Lukas Thorwald Hey on Twitter: “Every OS not called “VMS”, is just a nice try. VMS does real (parallel computing) clustering even across architectures (AXP/Integrity) and today’s operating systems would be nothing without features “borrowed” from VMS. Windows NT is just a rewritten VMS System.”
- [WayBack] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24 Here, have a nickel.… “
- [WayBack] Jeroen Pluimers on Twitter: “I almost wet my pants. The days (: I think Lukas is right BTW. Lot’s of what we do now has been done eons ago. We combine parts in different ways though, and do that in a much more rapid fashion. Which both make the lessons learned back then way more important than ever before.”
There is more gold in that thread. See below (:
–jeroen
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