Text written by Adam D. McKenna (and some other folks) at 07:31 PM 3/25/99
-0500:
>
>> >Sendmail is not a Unix program. It is an NT program that someone
>> >ported to Unix twenty years ago.
>>
>> Hmm...I can't quite see the humor in this, though it strikes me as
>> a bit funny, and not entirely untrue.
>>
>> But, I'll ask anyway: did you really intend to suggest that Sendmail
>> was originally written for Windows NT over twenty years ago?
>
>Yes. Sendmail was written for NT 0.01 pre-beta in 1979. It was ported to
>UNIX by Bill Gates in 1981.
Wow. You say that with such a straight face -- no smileys, nada. I'd
normally consider it deadpan humor and wind up on the floor laughing.
Unfortunately, MS' various departments and spokesthings have foisted
nonsense of a similar level of ludicrousness on the public too many times.
They say, in their deadpan way, "NT is at least as robust and scalable as
Linux", and "We integrated IE 4 with the operating system to benefit
consumers" and "We are winning our court case with the DoJ", and you can
only laugh uproariously at such things so many times before it sinks in:
these whackos are *serious!*
Then it stops being funny. It gets kind of ominous, in a Big-Brother-esque
kind of way, and that starts to infect your (or at least, my) view of
similar statements.
In fact, seeing such a thing on the Qmail list would probably be a bit
creepy, if I weren't sure you know better. :)
"Bill Gates? Isn't he the guy who invented the Internet, back in 1995?"
<shudder>
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
hungus /huhng'g*s/ /adj./
[perhaps related to slang `humongous'] Large, unwieldy, usually unman-
ageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code."
