Huw Davies wrote:
>
> At 09:50 AM 20-10-98 -0400, CLASSICCMP_at_trailing-edge.com wrote:
>
> >Why do you have to remember when you have VMS HELP available? :-)
>
> Hey, that's cheating :-) You're also luck that TIMEPROMPTWAIT starts with
> TIME. As far as I remember, wild carding within SYSGEN is not exactly
> optimal. Wildcards match the first occurrence....
>
> The story I heard about uFortnights was a bit of an "in joke" within VMS
> development. There was obviously a concerted effort to make VMS
> documentation as dry as IBM stuff is perceived, so the developers put up
> this new unit to see how far up the chain of cleansing it would go before
> being "expunged". I hear that there was some surprise and embarrassment
> when it escaped to customers.
An entry in the Unix fortune cookie database that dates back to
Berkeley, probably not later than the mid 70s, and likely got
there from older sources:
|Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term,
|convertible only through the use of weird and unnatural conversion
|factors. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per
|fortnight.
And from the Jargon file, on paper known as the New Hacker's
Dictionary, maintained by my co-conspirator Eric S. Raymond,
comes the following:
|microfortnight {n.} 1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time
| in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec.
| (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the
| mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS
| operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set
| with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the
| time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date
| and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus.
| This time is specified in microfortnights!
|
| Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and
| nanofortnight have also been reported.
--
Ward Griffiths <mailto:gram_at_cnct.com> <http://www.cnct.com/home/gram/>
WARNING: The Attorney General has determined that Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms can be hazardous to your health -- and get away with it.
Received on Sun Oct 25 1998 - 00:33:27 BST