[Sca-cooks] OT: boxen, vixen, blinkenlichten...

[El Hermoso Dormiendo]

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I will refrain from trotting out the "Men are from Macs, Women are from VMS"
joke (especially since I'd probably butcher it anyway)...

In case anyone had failed to reach their US RDA of Useless Knowledge:

"Vixen" was also the original planned name for the Commodore Vic-20.  It
was changed, supposedly, due to "vixen" having inappropriate connotations
in German.

Even today, among Linux/Unix nerds, commonly-encountered plural for (unix-ish)
computers is "boxen".  (the -en is a plural ending in German.  See also
"Blinkenlights").

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/boxen.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html

Totally unrelated, except tenuously to portions of the "blinkenlights" 
entry above, I found the "10 things everyone gets wrong about the internet"
article linked from Slashdot today (and written, evidently, by people
involved with the also-interesting "Cluetrain Manifesto") which I will pass
on while I'm sitting here being off-topic...

"What the Internet is, and how to stop mistaking it for something else." -
http://www.worldofends.com

"The Cluetrain Manifesto" - http://www.cluetrain.org/index.html#manifesto

signed,
El Hermoso Dormiendo, Penguinista.
On Tuesday 10 February 2004 08:42 pm, John Kemker wrote:
> Never ran the emasculated operating system on my VAXen.  Just VMS.
>
> Nowadays, however, nobody wants to pay me to manage VAXen, so I herd
> neutered and spayed cats for BellSouth.
>
> --Cian
> mka JohnK.
>
[...]
> >>> So "VAXen" are multiple, castrated computers?
> >
> > Sure, and castration is how you make unix. <GGG>
> >
> >> Think "vixen" as in the plural for female fox.  (Well, technically
> >> it's also the singular for a female fox, but....whatever!)
[...]
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