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Path: utzoo!linus!security!genrad!grkermit!masscomp!trb
From: trb@masscomp.UUCP (Andy Tannenbaum)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Re: computer song
Message-ID: <141@masscomp.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Nov-83 17:06:33 EST
Article-I.D.: masscomp.141
Posted: Tue Nov 29 17:06:33 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Dec-83 02:24:26 EST
References: <2413@ncsu.UUCP>
Organization: MASSCOMP, Littleton, MA
Lines: 42

"God Rest ye CS Students" was indeed originally written at Worcester
(MA) Tech in the fall of 1974 or thereabouts.  It was written by a
trio of prolific hacker songwriters, Albert J. Corda (alias NOVA),
David B. Kinder (alias David B.) and Richard S. Holmes (I don't
remember his alias).  

The original version was written with our beloved DEC KA-10 in mind.
We had LISP and ALGOL instead of C and Pascal.  We had no network in
those days, our second system was an RCA Spectra (360 clone) and when
it died, the threat was to run the programs on "the Wangs upstairs
instead" - the desktop calculators in the library!

Our main hacker who committed suicide (in the song) is Greg Walsh,
currently at Convergent Technologies, where he has been since they were
just an itty bitty company.  Poor guy.

The system we were waiting for was the next TOPS-10 release, 6.03,
which we feared would take 300K (36 bit words, though), which was
agonizing because we only had 160K words of core (yes, core.  A 64K
bay and three 32K bays).  There was also a verse "the bearings on the
drum are gone, the disk is wobbling too," we swapped off a drum, I
think DEC used to send a paleontologist to do field service.

There was a cryptic verse whose last line was "and now we find that D
is really 0.402" - the nums professor assigned a problem and one of
the given constants had a decimal point shifted by one place and the
system of equations would never converge, causing a great deal of
grief for all involved.

There were a whole mess of WACCC Christmas carols - "Magtapes Roasting
on an Open Fire" about a tape purge where the WACCC staff looked for
stolen games and lists of stolen passwords, was a favorite.

There was also a rather long saga (010 episodes) called "The
Adventures of the Lone Perkins" about Jolly Ed Perkins, a manager at
WACCC and the rest of the hackers.  It was chock FULL of DEC-10 puns.
Really classic sick humor.

Ah, the good old days.  And how our KA-10 could run!
Hi all you WPI hackers out there.

	Andy Tannenbaum   Masscomp Inc  Westford MA   (617) 692-6200 x274