| Original |
Parody |
Explanation |
| Heard
of a van that is loaded
with weapons, packed up and ready to go Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway, a place where nobody knows |
Heard of a program, loaded
with features, hacked up and ready to go Heard of some test sites, out on the East Coast, some places nobody knows |
Using an obscure customer for a
test site was often a good idea, since first versions of software often did not work so well. |
| The
sound of gunfire, off in the
distance, I'm getting used to it now |
The sound of core dumps, off in
the distance, I'm getting used to it now |
A core dump is the result of a
catastrophic failure within a program. The program would simply quit without any opportunity to save your work or any indication of what was wrong. The sound of a core dump was usually a ringing telephone with an irate customer on the other end. |
| Lived
in a brownstore, lived in
the ghetto, I've lived all over this town |
They want some manuals, they
want some app notes, I ain't got time for that now |
App note is an Application Note,
telling how to use a product for a particular task Documentation often lagged quite a bit behind the latest code, |
| This
ain't no party, this ain't
no disco, this ain't no fooling around |
This ain't no Daisy, this ain't
no Mentor, this ain't no fooling around |
Daisy and Mentor were Valid's
two biggest competitors |
| No
time for dancing, or lovey
dovey, I ain't got time for that now |
No time for Apples, or PC-ATs, I ain't got time for that now |
Management had these projects to
port to what engineering thought were rather useless platforms. |
| Transmit
the message, to the
receiver, hope for an answer some day |
Transmit a packet, into the
ether, hope for an answer some day |
This is actually the way the
Ethernet works. You send a packet and hope for a response. |
| I got
three passports, a couple
of visas, you don't even know my real name |
I got three RealChipsTM,
a couple of RealFastsTM, Don't even know my RealNameTM |
Valid had a lot of products that
started with the word "Real". RealChip allowed a software simulator to work using a physical chip, without a software model, by querying the chip when the simulator needed the next state. RealFast was a hardware simulation accelerator. |
| High
on a hillside, the trucks
are loading, everything's ready to roll |
Down in production, the tapes
are rolling, everything's ready to go |
"The tapes are rolling even as
we speak" was an often repeated line, from one of the production team. |
| I
sleep in the daytime, I work
in the nightime, I might not ever get home |
I sleep in the daytime, I work
in the nightime, I might not ever get home |
|
| This
ain't no party, this ain't
no disco, this ain't no fooling around |
This ain't no Daisy, this ain't
no Mentor, this ain't no fooling around |
|
| This
ain't no Mudd club, or C.
B. G. B., I ain't got time for that now |
This ain't no SouthCon, or
A.D.E.E. I ain't got time for that now |
More or less useless
conferences, at least from the engineering point of view. We wrote papers and attended, but probably no sales resulted from it. |
| Heard
about Houston? Heard about
Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh, PA? |
Heard about Seiden? Heard about
Crumett? Heard about Orange at D.A.? |
Seiden was fired after tussles
with (rather unreasonable and inflexible) engineering management. Crumett was very quietly let go without anyone being told. One day you wonder where he is, and realize he is not there any more.... Orange was an attempted marketing ploy at the design automation conference (DA). The idea was that a customer could design a circuit, we could get it built overnight (wire wrap) and show it to him, working, the next day. It took quite a bit of work to set up and we never got a single customer interested. |
| You
oughta know not to stand by
the window somebody might see you up there |
You oughta know not to scroll in
a window It's gonna take you all day |
Systems with windows became
popular after Valid built its hardware. It was possible to make windows work on the graphic terminal, but just barely. Despite the heroic efforts of John Reiser, (one of the world's best programers) they were slow, agonizingly slow, especially when scrolling. |
| I got
some groceries, some
peanut butter, to last a couple of days |
I got a truckload of Dr. Pepper,
to last a couple of days |
The IC group, in particular,
(where many of the parody authors came from) drank a LOT of Dr. Pepper. |
| But I
ain't got no speakers,
ain't got no headphones, ain't got no records to play |
Ain't got no speakers, only blue headphones; can't hear no music that way |
There were these heavy blue
noise-absorbing earmuffs that people sometimes wore when either the computers were too loud or they did not want to be distracted. |
| Why
stay in college? Why go to
night school? Gonna be different this time |
Why stay in college? Why go to
night school? Why get a CS degree? |
It's not like we were using any
fancy computer science. |
| Can't
write a letter, can't send
a postcard, I can't write nothing at all |
Can't read no FORTRAN, can't
write no Pascal, I can't do either in 'C'. |
Fortran was easy to write but
hard to read; Pascal was harder to write but easy to read. C could be both, sometimes it was hard to write (at least correctly), and often it was hard to read. There's a reason you never heard of an obfuscated Pascal contest. In all fairness, not everyone in Valid shared this view. Some thought C was far superior to Pascal. |
| This
ain't no party, this ain't
no disco, this ain't no fooling around |
This ain't no Daisy, this ain't
no Mentor, this ain't no fooling around |
|
| I'd
like to hold you, I'd love
you kiss you I ain't got no time for that now |
I'd like to change clothes, I'd
love to shower, I ain't got time for that now |
|
| Trouble
in transit, got through
the roadblock, we blended with the crowd We got computer, we're tapping phone lines, I know that ain't allowed |
Trouble in login, guessed the
root
password,, Somebody said it aloud, Now we got /dev/mem, we're patching UNIX, We know that that ain't allowed |
If you ever did get root access,
even temporarily, one thing you could do that was not really obvious and could help you in the future was to reset the permissions on /dev/mem, which allowed you (at some future time) to write into any memory location as an IO device. This allowed a non-priviledged program to change arbitrary memory and hence patch the kernal as desired. |
| We
dress like students, we dress
like housewives, or in a suit and a tie |
We dress like students, we dress
like Dead Heads, Never a suit and a tie |
|
| I
changed my hairstyle, so many
times now, I don't know what I look like! |
I changed my title, so many
times now, I don't know what my job's like! |
As the organization grew, and
reorg-ed, job title changes were very frequent |
| You
make me shiver, I feel so
tender, we make a pretty good team |
We run on VM, we run on VAXen, They make a pretty poor team |
VAXen, of course, is the plural
of VAX. In addition to UNIX, we sold our software on VAX (by DEC) and VM (by IBM) machines. Some of these had pretty poor software enviroments. File transfers and terminal emulation were wildly different between VM and VAX machines, in particular. |
| Don't
get exhausted, I'll do
some driving, you ought to get some sleep |
Got no debugger, have to use
writelns, Get printouts, ream after ream |
Without a source level debugger,
or in some cases any debugger at all, and especially in the case of core dumps, debugging often consisted of writing out lots of intermediate results, then searching through the resulting output for the source of problems. (writeln is the Pascal command to generate a line of output.) |
| Get
your instructions, follow directions, then you should change your address |
Don't get exhausted, I'll do
some coding, you ought to get you some sleep |
Coding is writing code - nothing
to do with encryption (intentionally, anyway) |
| Maybe
tomorrow, maybe the next day, whatever you think is best |
Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next
day, There'll be some food we can eat |
The company cafeteria was
subsidized, and inexpensive, but some of the dishes were ...... creative |
| Burned
all my notebooks, what
good are notebooks? They won't help me survive |
Burned all my comments, what
good are comments? They won't help me compile, |
Typical startup programmer... |
| My
chest is aching, burns like a
furnace, the burning keeps me alive |
My shortened program, core
dumped in malloc(), Guess I'll debug for a while |
Programs that core dumped were
particularly hard to debug in the days before source code debuggers. A program that core dumped in malloc() was even worse, because the usual reason for this behavior is that some code, somewhere, stomped on memory it should not have touched, usually long before the problem becomes apparent. A shortened program was one where the source code had been run thorough a program that shortened all the identifier and routine names to cope with the limitations of some compilers. This made debugging harder as well, since you could not even tell which routines were called or variables used without a cross-reference table, and at least initial versions of the 'shorten' program removed comments as well. So if your shortened program core dumped in malloc(), you would indeed be debugging for a while. |
| Try
to stay healthy, physical
fitness, don't want to catch no disease Try to be careful, don't take no chances, you better watch what you say |
Try to stay healthy, physical
fitness, don't want to catch no disease Try to be careful, don't take no chances, better not ride in the street |
Pete Zakel got struck and nearly
killed when riding his bicycle on a street near Valid. |