What's in a name?

Dredged from the USENET archives, this is the oldest publicly available version of the "See figure 1" joke to which I can ascribe a precise date.

(Thank you, Henry Spencer, for preserving this and so much else.)

sultan!dag was a gentleman named Daniel Glasser, who worked for DEC at the time. He does not appear to have been the original author of the joke.

Thanks to Clem Cole, a DEC alumnus from that era, I've been told that "See figure 1" substantially predates the posting below, and likely is originally from the 36-bit (TOPS-10/TOPS-20) group at DEC.

Clem himself has a version from DEC internal email with a date of 3 August, 1982, and other friends of Clem at DEC recall seeing a TOPS-themed version posted in the halls around 1980.

Message-ID: <bnews.sultan.116> Newsgroups: net.jokes Path: utzoo!decvax!sultan!dag X-Path: utzoo!decvax!sultan!dag From: sultan!dag Date: Mon Jan 10 03:54:14 1983 Subject: Subject: See figure 1 Posted: Sun Jan 9 23:17:17 1983 Received: Mon Jan 10 03:54:14 1983 VMS Version 3 Please stop submitting SPR's. This is our system. We designed it, we built it, and we use it more than you do. If there are some features you think might be missing, if the system isn't as effective as you think it could be, TOUGH! Give it back, we don't need you. See figure. --------------------------------- ! ! ! { } ! ! | | ! ! | | ! ! .-.! !.-. ! ! .-! ! ! !.-. ! ! ! ! ! ; ! ! \ ; ! ! \ ; ! ! ! : ! ! ! | ! ! | | ! ! ! !_______________________________! Figure 1. Forget about your silly problem, let's take a look at some of the features of the VMS operating system. 1) Options. We've got lots of them. So many in fact, that you need two strong people to carry the documentation around. So many that it will be a cold day in hell before half of them are used. So many that you are probably not going to do your work right anyway. However, the number of options isn't all that important, because we picked some interesting values for the options and called them ... 2) Defaults. We put a lot of thought into our defaults. We like them. If we didn't, we would have made something else be the default. So keep your cotton-picking hands off our defaults. Don't touch. Consider them mandatory. "Mandatory defaults" has a nice ring to it. Change them and your system crashes, tough. See figure 1. 3) Language Processors. They work just fine. They take in source, and often produce object files as a reward for your efforts. You don't like the code? Too bad! You can even try to call operating system services from them. For any that you can't, use the assembler like we do. We spoke to the language processor developers about this, they think a lot like we do, they said "See figure 1". 4) Debuggers. We've got debuggers, one we support and one we use. You shouldn't make mistakes anyway, it is a waste of time. We don't want to hear anything about debuggers, we're not interested, See figure 1. 5) Error Logging. Ignore it. Why give yourself an ulcer? You don't want to give us the machine to get the problem fixed and we probably can't do it anyway. Oh, and if something breaks between 17:00 and 18:00 or 9:30 and 10:30 or 11:30 and 13:30 or 14:30 and 15:30 don't waste your time calling us, we're out. See figure 1. 6) Command Language. We designed it ourselves, it's perfect. We like it so much we put our name on it, DCL- Digital's Command Language. In fact we're so happy with it, we designed it once for each of our operating systems. We even try to keep it the same from release to release, sometimes we blow it though, See figure 1. 7) Real Time Performance. We got it. Who else could have done such a good job? So the system seems sluggish with all those priority 18 processes, no problem, just make them priority 1. Anyway, realtime isn't important anymore like it used to be. We changed our groups name to get rid of the word realtime, we told all our realtime users to see figure 1 a long time ago. In conclusion, stuff your SPR. Love VMS or leave it, but don't complain. -adapted from TOPS-20