• tal@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I’m pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on “links” on a web page.

    Then there’s email. There’s mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      8 months ago

      Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.

      The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it’s unrelated, being developed for Multics… Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.

      There’s a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university’s new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      Pine has been forked to Alpine

      Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.

      In other news, I never knew pine’s genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.