Post your programming jokes here!

Here's mine, a true story:

My friend and I were on two separate PC's, formatting hard drives.

We get to the A:> prompt, and I type in fdisk (which initiates the formatting sequence), and my friend does the same.

Suddenly his computer gets an error message saying Improper command line.

He types it in two or three more times, then says to me, "Hey, my computer isn't accepting fdisk."

I come over to look. Turns out he typed fdick over and over again. I was actually and truely roflol.

I call my friend 'perv-boy' now.

Lol! Though I´m not into that stuff, that was actually pretty funny! Made me laugh 2 XD

Cadc (SA) (Leader)

Same here! That's pretty funny!!

LMAO Spunk...

One time, I was playing this game called Grapple, it's a scrambled word game, And I put up the word "Syntax", nobody could figure it out, then my dad got it...

Ahh scrabble....a good college drinking game....i had to argue about if "winblows" was a real word. I insisted that it was....nobody else agreed

B

This is a way back in the days of punch cards tale.

We were four lowly students earning a meager few pence by writting programs for the faculty. There was one experimental psych prof who refused to allow us to do his work, Instead he would stride into the computer room, order aside whomever was at the console and begin running his program.

The machine was an IBM 1620. It was the size of three large chests of drawers stood side to side. Excluding the card reader and printer. Each of which was equally large. I had 12kb of BCD (binary coded decimal) random access magnetic core memory. Drum memory drives, a precursor to disk drives, were much more expensive than the budget would allow. In those days programs were punched on Holorith cards. The console was an IBM electric typewriter. Across the front panel were an array of flashing lights, not LEDs, and switches

One of the functions available was, OnSenseSwitch(). This would cause the machine to check the setting of one of the several switches on the front panel and perform and action dependent upon the switch setting.

Now this particular prof did not really trust that old computer, so he peppered his programs with OnSenseSwitch() commands. All of which were the same. OnSenseSwitch(Pause) Which would cause the machine to halt while the prof painstakingly verified each of the computer's calculations by hand. Hence a program that one of us could have executed in twenty minutes would, when written by this prof, consume three to five hours of computer time. Time during which we could not do our work, this was long before multi-tasking, and time for which we would not be paid. And since he was senior faculty we were powerless to curtail his use of the machine. Nonetheless, a couple of us always needed to be available to correct the prof's errors or to remind him how to use the card punch.

One evening at the Chocolate Moose, over a few too many glasses of brugandy, we arrived at a communal solution.

Each user had his own Fortran Compiler Deck that was stored in a cabinet just inside the computer room. Over the course of a few evenings we created a special compiler that we supstituted for that of the annoying prof. We modified the OnSenseSwitch() function so that it would branch to a chunk of code we added to the end of the deck.

On the magic day all four of us were in the room when the annoying prof ran his program.

At the expected moment he reached up and toggled Sense Switch One.

The console typed, "Hijo de puta" and stopped.

He looked at the console. Looked at the switch. Frowned and toggled the switch again.

The console typed, "Cabron'

He sat back. Looked toward us but we were all very busy with very important projects.

He toggled the next switch. The console began to type the list of several dozen insulting phrases we had appended to his deck. When it had finished with those it began to dump the core to the console.

He flipped switchs madly while the lights flashed at him and the console alternated between core dumps and obscenity in six different languages.

Finally he stood, looked towards the four of us, each engaged in a very important project, and quietly asked, "Help?"

We helped him debug his program but no matter how hard we tried we could not find the bug that caused the machine to take such a dislike to him. We suggested that he recompile and try again.

He did. Same outcome. And again. And again.

Finally he threw his hands in the air. He turned to me and said, "I thought I understood this better but it is beyond me." He dumped his stack of research notes on the work table. Produced an outline of what he wanted and asked me when we thought we might have something for him.

I considered for a moment. Consulted with my associates who had temporarily put aside their very important projects. And told him we might have something by the end of the week.

As soon as he left we replaced his compiler deck, hiding the doctored deck in a very secret place - one never knows when a doctored compiler might come in handy - put aside our very important projects and adjorned to the Chocolate Moose to imbibe in way too much red wine.

....sluggy the nefarious

Last edited: Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 8:18:23 AM

Sweet mother of electron-pumping, paper-chomping of silicon glory! What a story, Sluggy! Thankfully, my school had already upgraded to tape-reals and those HUGE floppies (no, not 5.25bigger). However, we messed with the punch-card system just so we would understand what the reels were replacing. You created a doctored compiler as a student on those things? <bows deeply...we're not worthy!> The best story I have is when I was taking a typing class in Junior High using Apple IIe computers. By then, I was already a self-taught programmer using my family's system. This program would test you at typing speed (deducting points for errors), and then print out a serialized score sheet to submit to the instructor. The projects were a breeze for me, but I saw a weakness in the program. I told the instructor that anyone with programming knowledge would be able to generate a scorecard with any score they wished. He nonchalantly replied that "the system was designed to prevent that. It can't be done." Of course, nobody would be so stupid to say that today, but he was a man new to computers who actually trusted them too much! So, I happily hacked in some code real quick, and then submitted a properly-serialized scoresheet with 940 words-per-minute and 1 error. :P I was then sent to the principal's office (what is this, Grade School?), and had a 1-grade reduction on my report-card for tampering with school property and cheating. Mind you, I was just trying to prove my point, and I didn't share my method with the other students. Unfortunately, this just gave me a bad attitude, so I started to cause all kinds of grief with teachers who trusted their computers too much, I just made sure I wasn't caught.

<sigh> I was a punk, then. Thank God, I met a few good friends who kept me from becoming one of those hacker/virus programmers, for I was certainly headed in that direction.

- BombJames Bomb

Lol, sry sluggy and JB, I hate reading that much :P

Cadc (SA) (Leader)

I got nothing to compare with those. The closest I come is (back in '94) finding a freeware program that would stick electronic Post-It notes on your screen. This program had an alarm function to it, so that you could set a Post-It note to show up at a specific time to remind you of something. And you could tell it to play a sound when it opened the note. So one day I went into my managers office, installed the program, and instructed it to open a Post-It note every 30 seconds for 10 minutes, and to use an annoying ringing sound with it. The great joy is that this note was always the top-most window, so it interrupted whatever he was doing at the time.

And he almost missed it. He got back from a meeting only 10 minutes before they were all set to go off. I nearly went in and disarmed them...

LOL! Good stories! XD

LOL you guys! Good jokes!

Heres another one from me, also a true story with the same friend.

My friend and I were taking a computer apart, which had a very curvacious front.

We took of the front and discovered there was a part that looked like plastic antlers, except all squiggley.

My friend took these "antlers" and put them on his head, laughing.

"I look like some sort of a moose," he said.

I laughed and said, "Yeah, a happy moose!"

We both laughed again, and my friend said in a sing-song high pitched voice, "Am th' Happy Moose!"

So we spent the next hour inventing a new show that starred the Happy Moose.

We then threw the antlers on my bed and went to his house to play.

Sadly, my dad unknowingly threw the antlers away and the garbage truck picked it up. (It was a wednesday)

So now all we have are the memories of good ol' happy moose.