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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!ut-sally!crandell
From: crandell@ut-sally.UUCP (Jim Crandell)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Honest, this will hurt me more than it will you
Message-ID: <689@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Dec-83 18:37:43 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.689
Posted: Wed Dec 21 18:37:43 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Dec-83 01:30:05 EST
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 40

Three-Letter Computers (Armyank, Nahyok) is about to introduce
a new package offering (what else is new); it will be available
soon at your local 3LC package store.  You'll see most of the
important technical stuff in the near future, but one of the
items 3LC probably won't pass along is the story behind one of the
more unusual developments in the project.  Now, 3LC has been under
quite a bit of pressure from the marketplace to conform to various
technical standards, at least in certain types of products.
What a lot of people don't know, though, is that the Electronic
Industries Association, for so long the standard bearer (so to
speak) of the general electronics component marketplace and having
to its credit what must certainly be one of the most (shall we
say) colorful standards around, has grown envious of the influence
now wielded by IEEE in the field of standardization.  The GPIB
standard is a case in point, and the Association has recently
fired a retaliatory salvo in the form of a new standard of its own
aimed at general-purpose input/output applications.

Meanwhile, 3LC management fell into a quandry regarding the form
to be taken by the peripheral device interface conventions to be
applied to this new offering, and that problem was solved by
delegating the task of selecting a suitable standard to one of the
overseas divisions.  Now, everyone knows that 3LC has a research
arm in Boeblingen (seasoned 3LCers call it "Bubblegum"), but this
particular job went to the Hamburg installation, where the
investigators, after putting their best thoughts into the project,
eventually declared that the optimum standard for the purpose was
the one just defined by the EIA.  In need of a code name for this
particular set of plans (3LC likes to code-name everything, you
may recall), the muckamucks remembered that the decision had been
the responsibility of the Hamburgers, so in a stroke of brilliance
which surely has no parallel in the annals of computing, they
saddled the unfortunate peripheral interface spec with the
uncovetable moniker "McDonald".

Thus it came about that old McDonald had a form -- EIA I/O.
-- 
   Jim ({ihnp4,kpno,ut-ngp}!ut-sally!crandell or crandell@ut-sally.UUCP)