Ben Halpern

Posted on Jun 23, 2019

Tell me some useless (or useful) software trivia

#discuss

Tell me a factoid I might not know about. It could be some weird edge case, a moment in history, or little known reasons for why some software behaves the way it does.

Top comments (55)

David Wickes • Jun 23 '19

From the top of my head:

C, as in the language, stands for Christopher.
D in MS-DOS originally stood for Dirty.
We call anonymous functions 'lambdas' either because the Greek letter was easier to print than a hat, or because someone played eenie-meenie-minie-mo.
Ken Iverson was able to get IBM to build a whole new printer, with new characters on it, to write his APL programming language.
The first programming language used on a Unix machine was dc, a stack based Reverse Polish calculator still present on Linux/Mac today.
Type M-x doctor in Emacs to get access to a Rogerian psychotherapist.
The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down your typing
The reason keyboard rows are offset is to allow the hammers on a typewriter to fit inbetween them.
The Caps Lock key only moved to its current location in 1984 to satisfy the increasing number of secretaries using computer keyboards. It used to be Control.

... I'll have a think and come back ...

Ken Bellows • Jun 23 '19

The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down your typing

This one seems to be an urban legend, probably not actually true
smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fa...

David Wickes • Jun 24 '19

That's fun! Although I'm not sure if it's any better to know that QWERTY is an efficiency hack for transcribing telegrams from Morse.

Ken Bellows • Jun 23 '19 • Edited

We call anonymous functions 'lambdas' either because the Greek letter was easier to print than a hat, or because someone played eenie-meenie-minie-mo

Can you elaborate on this one? "Lambdas" are named after the lambda calculus, which originated in the 1930s... Is the stuff about hats and eenie-meenie related to the name of the lambda calculus?

David Wickes • Jun 24 '19

Willingly. You'll find most of it on the Wikipedia page under History, but in brief:

either Alonzo Church picked a random Greek letter, in his own words by eenie-meenie.
or he started with a 'hat' over a variable - like ê - which got shifted to the left to become an upside down V. Which looks like a capital lambda, and so it was lowercased.

David Taitingfong • Jun 23 '19

I was informed that C was named so because it came after the B language (made by Bell Labs) - where did this Christopher thing come from?

David Wickes • Jun 24 '19 • Edited

So B came from BCPL, the Basic Combined Programming Language at Cambridge. Which came from the (unimplemented) CPL - Combined Programming Language.

The C also stood for Cambridge. But it was also known as Christopher's Programming Language after one of its inventors, Christopher Strachey.

source: The Art of Unix Programming

johnfound • Jun 23 '19

The Caps Lock key only moved to its current location in 1984 to satisfy the increasing number of secretaries using computer keyboards. It used to be Control.

I always remap caplock as a Ctrl in my keyboards. Very comfortable.

David Wickes • Jun 23 '19

I always remap caplock as a Ctrl in my keyboards.

If you don't YOU'RE A MONSTER!

Riccardo Bernardini • Jun 24 '19

Actually, on my ezbook (with US keyboard) I remapped the Caps Lock to the "Compose" key in order to type accented letters (for everything else there is Shift-Ctrl-u + unicode) :-)

João Ferreira • Jun 27 '19

I'm a monster, cause I only use Shift (with little finger)

Kasper Meyer • Jun 23 '19

This one blew me away when I first read it years ago.

Behold: The case of the 500-mile email

ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

João Ferreira • Jun 27 '19

This is gold

johnfound • Jun 27 '19

That is good, but you MUST read the FAQ to this story. There is a link in the header.

Luke Westby • Jun 23 '19 • Edited

Microsoft Excel originally (and perhaps still?) treated the year 1900 as a leap year in its date computations even though it is not a leap year. It was an intentional choice. The existing spreadsheet software with the greatest market share at the time of Excel’s release was Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3 had the same behavior via a legitimate bug. By replicating the behavior, Excel could import Lotus 1-2-3’s file format with no unexpected outcomes for the user. This made the switch to Excel seamless and it quickly dominated the market.

Peter Kim Frank • Jun 24 '19

Fascinating!

Howard Jess • Jun 26 '19

Nice note. In the 80s, I worked on a 3D spreadsheet program named BitsCalc (later BoeingCalc). We inserted the same behavior, for the same reason.

Molly Struve (she/her) • Jun 23 '19

Molly Struve 🦄

@molly_struve

Do you know why @elastic originally choose port 5601 for Kibana?

Bc if you flip and reverse it, it spells LOGS!!!!! 💥

16:59 PM - 28 Mar 2019

35 94

Sajjad Heydari • Jun 23 '19

Do you know lisp uses () instead of [] solely because the keyboard that was used to develop its first versions had a problem with [ key?

Ryland G • Jun 23 '19 • Edited

When Apple acquired NEXT in 1996, they mostly did it so Jobs could return to his previous role. But Apple/Jobs also saw the NEXT OS as a serious improvement over the existing Mac OS.

Because of this, Apple chose to build the next OS on top of NEXT. In fact, up until recently (might even still be the case) if you peeked into the source code of OSX you would still find original unmodified NEXT files. So in some ways if you’re running OSX you are still running part of NEXT.

Fernando B 🚀 • Jun 23 '19

That's why tons of classes have NS in the beginning, Next Step.

Aaron Powell • Jun 23 '19

Heres a few of mine:

JavaScript has both +0 and -0
The original version of the .NET framework was written in Java
C# is actually an implementation of an ECMA spec
PowerPoint is Turing-complete (along with a surprising list of other things)

Andrew Wooldridge • Jun 25 '19

Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete: toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/

Casey Brooks • Jun 24 '19

In 2009, a carrier pigeon was faster and more reliable at data transfers than the Internet in South Africa.

Source: wired.com/2009/09/in-africa-a-pige...

Jonathan Kuhl • Jun 24 '19 • Edited

Binary isn't the only system. A bi-quinary system was also proposed that would have, due to the wavelength nature of electricity, given us the ability to have a decimal system in our computers. Five levels of voltage above ground, five levels of voltage below. However, such a system was complex, power-hungry, and unreliable due to quantum mechanics (if the wavelengths were too small, it got difficult to precisely measure which level its at, and if the wavelengths are too big, it was too energy inefficient.)

youtube.com/watch?v=thrx3SBEpL8