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What's Your Computing Cocktail Party Fact?

Andrew (he/him) on February 26, 2019

Inspired by Lucas' comment... Lucas Olivera • Feb 26 '19 ...
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Kasey Speakman

Admiral Grace Hopper used to hand out lengths of wire just under 1 ft (30 cm). She called these nanoseconds, because it was the distance that light (or radio) can travel in 1 ns. They were visual aids that help to demonstrate the answer to questions like: why does satellite communication take so long? why is it important for CPUs to become smaller to be faster?

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Ben Lovy

I've always enjoyed that the version numbers for TeX approach Pi. Current stable release is 3.14159265.

No, I'm not generally a hit at parties.

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Andrew (he/him)

Lol my fact was about laundry detergent so I'm not one to judge.

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Oliver

usr (as in /usr/local/bin/...) doesn't stand for 'user'. It's short for 'universal system resources'.

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

Not true, it originally did stand for user. It was generally the mount point with the most storage capacity, etc.
See for example tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hier...

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Oliver

Argh. That will teach me for picking up my cocktail party trivia from twitter.

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Andreas Jakof

Debugging was initially really removing bugs from relays. And the Debugger went through to pick bugs, which were stuck in them.
Also the term „Patch“ originates from punch cards, where they fixed a mistake by putting a patch over the punched hole.

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Roman Hochuli
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Andrew (he/him)

Oh my god.

Moreover, although the Ubuntu OS is partly free and open source software, Ubuntu Cola should not be confused with open-source cola such as OpenCola.

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Gualtiero Frigerio

The term SPAM we use in the context of emails derives from a sketch
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(Monty_...

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Andrew (he/him)

And the Python language is named after Monty Python! They've really had quite the impact on computer science, haven't they?

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Gualtiero Frigerio • Edited

Oh yes, I knew it and I forgot to mention on my post that they even inspired a language!
That reminds me one of them used to appear in Compaq commercials during the 80s.
Search for "John Cleese Compaq" on youtube, there are a few ads he made

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Michiel Hendriks • Edited

The first documented computer bug was an actual bug.

Note that before that the term bug was already used to describe issues with systems. But they were not actual documented computer bugs.

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James

Half a byte is known as a nibble.

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Daniel Marlow

HP, Microsoft and Apple were all started in garages.