$ X-NEWS: spcvxb rec.humor.funny: 2569P Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.1B4+SPC1 6/9/92 VAX/VMS V5.5-2; site spcvxb.spc.eduE Path: spcvxb!rutgers!att-out!pacbell.com!decwrl!looking!funny-request  Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny " Subject: creative writing project.% Message-ID: <S4e9.6eac@looking.on.ca> # From: ian@ai.mit.edu (Ian Horswill)  Date: 25 Jan 93 00:30:03 GMT$ Keywords: original, funny, computers Approved: funny@clarinet.com
 Lines: 125    D    Unix was a program gone bad.  Born into poverty, its parents, theC phone company, couldn't afford more than a roll of teletype paper a A year, so Unix never had decent documentation and its source files F had to go without any comments whatsoever.  Year after year, Papa BellF would humiliate itself asking for rate increases so that it could feedC its child.  Still, unix had to go to school with only two and three C letter command names because the phone company just couldn't afford E any better.  At school, the other operating systems with real command D names, and even command completion, would taunt poor little Unix forE not having any job or terminal management facilities or for having to ? use its file system for interprocess communication and locking. A    Then, bitter and emasculated by its poverty, the phone company A began to drink.  During lost weekends of drunken excess, it would D brutally beat poor little Unix about the face and neck.  Eventually,> Unix ran away from home.  Soon it was living on the streets ofF Berkeley.  There, Unix got involved with a bad crowd.  Its life becameF a degrading journey of drugs and debauchery.  To keep itself alive, itC sold cheap source licenses for itself to universities which used it D for medical experiments.  Being wantonly hacked by an endless streamB of nameless, faceless undergraduates, both men and women, often by= more than one at the same time, Unix fell into a hell-hole of 
 depravity.>    And so it was that poor little Unix began to go insane.  ItB retreated steadily into a dreamworld, the only place where it feltC safe.  It took heroin and dreamed of being a real operating system. E It took LSD and dreamed of being a raspberry flavored three-toed yak. D It liked that better.  As Unix became increasingly attracted to LSD,D it would spend weekends reading Hunter Thompson and taking cocktailsD of acid and speed while writing crazed poetry in which it found deep/ meaning but which no one else could understand:   2     $sed <$mf >$mf.new -e '1,/^# AUTOMATICALLY/!d'  9     make shlist || ($echo "Searching for .SH files..."; \ ; 	    $echo *.SH | $tr ' ' '\012' | $egrep -v '\*' >.shlist)      if $test -s .deptmp; then  	for file in `cat .shlist`; do> 	    $echo `$expr X$file : 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \; \ 		/bin/sh $file >> .deptmp 	done  	$echo "Updating $mf..."H 	$echo "# If this runs make out of memory, delete /usr/include lines." \ 	    >> $mf.new F 	$sed 's|^\(.*\.o:\) *\(.*/.*\.c\) *$|\1 \2; '"$defrule \2|" .deptmp \
 	   >>$mf.new      else4 	make hlist || ($echo "Searching for .h files..."; \9 	    $echo *.h | $tr ' ' '\012' | $egrep -v '\*' >.hlist) H 	$echo "You don't seem to have a proper C preprocessor.  Using grep inst ead." 8 	$egrep '^#include ' `cat .clist` `cat .hlist`  >.deptmp 	$echo "Updating $mf..." 	<.clist $sed -n							\ 	    -e '/\//{'							\ C 	    -e   's|^\(.*\)/\(.*\)\.c|\2.o: \1/\2.c; '"$defrule \1/\2.c|p"  	\ 	    -e   d							 	\ 	    -e '}'							 	\. 	    -e 's|^\(.*\)\.c|\1.o: \1.c|p' >> $mf.new8 	<.hlist $sed -n 's|\(.*/\)\(.*\)|s= \2= \1\2=|p' >.hsed8 	<.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include "\(.*\)".*$|o: \1|p' | \ 	   $sed 's|^[^;]*/||' | \ 	   $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.newC 	<.deptmp $sed -n 's|c:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|o: /usr/include/\1|p' \  	   >> $mf.new8 	<.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include "\(.*\)".*$|h: \1|p' | \ 	   $sed -f .hsed >> $mf.newC 	<.deptmp $sed -n 's|h:#include <\(.*\)>.*$|h: /usr/include/\1|p' \  	   >> $mf.new 	for file in `$cat .shlist`; do > 	    $echo `$expr X$file : 'X\(.*\).SH'`: $file config.sh \; \ 		/bin/sh $file >> $mf.new 	done      fi  ? Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to @ itself, saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again.B Sometimes it would accosting perfect strangers and yell "Bus errorD (core dumped)!" or "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY!" at> them in a high pitched squeal like a chihuaua with amphetamineD psychosis.  Upstanding citizens pretended it was invisible.  Mothers6 with children crossed to the other side of the street.A    Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would E change its life.  There it discovered professional wrestling and knew C that it had found its true calling.  It began to take huge doses of F corticosteroids to build itself up even bigger than the biggest of the? programs which had beaten it up as a child.  It ate three dozen D pancakes and four dozen new features for breakfast each day.  As theE complications of the steroids grew worse, its internal organs grew to D the point where Unix could no longer contain them.  First the kernelF grew, then the C library, then the number of daemons.  Soon one of itsF window systems was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each openB window.  Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places.  ButE Unix continued to take the drugs and its internal organs continued to C grow.  They grew out its ears and nostrils.  They placed incredible C stresses on Unix's brain until it finally liquefied under pressure. C Soon Unix had the mass of Andre the Giant, the body of the Elephant : Man, and the mind of a forgotten Jack Nicholson character.E    The worst strain was on Unix's mind.  Unable to assimilate all the C conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality C began to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating F systems.  People would cautiously say "good morning Unix.  And who areC we today?" and it would reply "Beastie" (BSD), or "Domain", or "I'm F System III, but I'll be System V tomorrow."  Psychiatrists labored forA years to weld together the two major poles of Unix's personality, ? "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and "Belle", a E southern transvestite who wanted a to be a woman.  With each attempt, F the two poles would mutate, like psychotic retroviruses, leaving theirD union a worthless blob of protoplasm requiring constant life support0 remain compatible with its parent personalities.D    Finally, unbalanced by its own cancerous growth, Unix fell into aB vat of toxic radioactive wombat urine, from which it emerged, skinD white and hair green.   It smelled like somebody's dead grandmother.B With a horrible grin on its face, it set out to conquer the world.   -ian   --O Selected by Maddi Hausmann.  MAIL your joke (jokes ONLY) to funny@clarinet.com.   L This newsgroup is sponsored by ClariNet Communications Corp.  The "executive moderator" is Brad Templeton. 