[bIlluminati]

When pros read ‘The Soul of a New Machine’, they immediately went out and shorted the company. Fascinating read, and almost a canonical example of ‘how not to’. However, many others read it and assumed that 80 hour weeks were the way to go. Much buggy software ensued.

[mkjessup]

When pros read ‘The Soul of a New Machine’, they immediately went out and shorted the company. Fascinating read, and almost a canonical example of ‘how not to’. However, many others read it and assumed that 80 hour weeks were the way to go. Much buggy software ensued.

However there was much sardonic humor when one of those buggy features was discovered, i.e., one of the games included in the Data General software package was the old text-based 'Adventure' where you are inside a mountain and you move with 'forward', 'right', 'left', 'up', 'down', etc., and interact with the various characters that way as well. In one cave there is the word 'xyzzy' on the wall and if you type that in, it 'magically' transports you to another region of the maze. However if you try typing in that word in the wrong area, the game responds with 'nothing happens'. Ok, now the stage is set:

IF, while using the CLI (Command Line Interpreter) under Data General's AOS (or AOS/VS), and you type in the word 'xyzzy', AOS responds the same way: 'nothing happens'.

We laughed many times at n00b computer operators who thought they were quite the whiz at playing 'Adventure' who were nudged into trying the 'magic word' in the real-time AOS-world, LOL