Sit right back and I'll tell you a tale. Fortune is a parasite glommed over the original intents of the Architecture of what is now known as Fortune.

Originally as the high gods intended the whole mess was nothing but a Rolodex, a box of index cards, etc.

You see, the first line of the '%' delimited records would be a 'LAST FIRST PHONE' and the rest would be for instance 'SMITH, JOE 867-5309' on the rest would be 'wife Mary, 3 kids (Joseph, Adam, Beth), maybe address, etc.'.

The '.dat' portion created by the 'strfile' would take that file and alphabetize it and then keep the 'seek' offsets in the file for each record. This let you have a big (for the time) Rolodex with fast retrieval upon search. Binary tree and all that, plus fast read of whole record because ... binary search, read one line match or not then difference between match and next record would be bytes needed to read (minus 1 for the '%'.

Fortune 'fortune(6)' started life as an address book,The random and multiple files and all that jazz was just a bunch of repurposing that took over and became a life of it's own. Nobody uses the 'first line sort' bit of 'strfile' program. Mostly the original has vanished into the wind, I have no clue what the command line thing was to bring up the Rolodex/Index Card of somebody was.

The 'man' page doesn't do it justice, but nobody really cares, and I like many others have a '~/quotes' file that is automated and hot-key bound to selecting a bit of text and preassing a couple of keys. If you know the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling thing, you dont' even need the '.dat' file for the random bit.

> SMITH, JOE 867-5309

That's Jenny's number, not Joe's

Reminds me of the old SmokePing.

Freshman year of high school I took a class called "Business Computer Applications". It was 1983 and I was 13. We were using Apple II+ computers or their clones. I had an Apple II+ since they came out and knew lots of things by then. I "wowed" my teacher with 3 line programs and such. On our classroom floppy I had a file with a control character in it's name, it was a disk editor. Knowing the disk directory layout things (it was a linked list of blocks), I carved out a whole hidden set of directory entries. So each day of class I would load up the disk editor using the invisible control characters, patch back in my hidden blocks, play with my hidden files, then at the end of class I'd load the disk editor up again and hide my files. Teacher never saw what was really on that disk.

>classroom floppy

Wow

Back in middle school, like 1981-ish I had this hardback book with a title of something like "A Shocking Story". The inside was hollowed out to hold about the same but it was rigged to go off when you opened the book. It got confiscated.

I married my best friend of several years so she could get financial aid. Her financial aid counselor told her about the lengthy emancipation legal process or marriage. She came over one night with a "I have a huge favor to ask of you" and about a week later we were married.

My spouse and I got married "early" in the court system for a similar reason, in order to qualify for in-state tuition. However, we then had a proper wedding in front of our family and community a few months later, so I'm not sure it would really matter to the policy makers. Definitely helped drive home for us, though: there are three different marriages in a marriage:

There is a legal contract, that is important to people you have never met and will never meet, and, if things are going right, is never at all relevant to your actual marriage in any way except for how it lets you navigate government policy.

There is a social contract, that is important to everyone who acknowledges you as a couple (and also people who have never business seeing you this way).

And there is your actual relationship, which may be enhanced or degraded by the previous two elements, but is somewhat oblique to both.

did you stay married?

Technically, yes for about seven years. We were introduced by a mutual friend because we were both staying on campus over the Christmas holiday. We hooked up on Christmas Eve and dropped some acid and had a fun few days. We were both the oddly precocious types who graduated high school at 16/17. We were both sorta slutty. We just became best of friends for the next few years (we both went our own separate ways romantically, we would eventually even go out and hook up with each others roommates...) We went out and got tattoos together on her 18th birthday. It was a couple of years later that we got married (I like to pontificate that we got married by the justice of the peace in the Blade Runner building. It was justice of the peace and somewhere in an old downtown LA building, no frills). She had her mothers or grandmothers ring or such, mine was a Peace symbol ring from a gumball machine with the Peace symbol torn off.... It turned my finger green unless coated with clear nail polish. About six months later I left university and moved halfway across the country. It was always interesting to eventually tell girlfriends and such that "by the way, technically I'm married". Around seven years later I ran into another mutual friend who told me that she had been looking for me to sign papers and such and couldn't find me. We did meet up again a few years later and nothing came up, she finally settled down and got really married. I assume she got a rubber stamp divorce for abandonment or even non-consummation (almost, but we were both so "too drunk to fuck" on Extacy that we gave up and just went back to the party). She's still a fond memory of a bestest friend for years, we could like read each other's minds, almost too dangerous to be serious.

I would watch this movie! Would probably be better than “the Pursuit of happiness”

The right way to think of marriage for government purposes is a contract. If someone has entered in this contract, they get certain benefits. If the benefits are properly designed, they are valid only for the duration of the contract. As long as both people were abiding by the terms of the contract, it’s not fraud.

It beat the fraud of getting married for the sole purpose of getting into someone's pants!

Back in the late 1980s when I was a teenager I found plans and built this little circuit with a LED that would light up if someone else in the house was trying to listen in on my phone calls. More than one phone off the hook... LED lights up.

Good project for a comparator chip! Just set the trigger threshold slightly below the off-hook voltage for your extension and it shows when another local phone is also off-hook. Only works locally though, and will not let you know if your phone is tapped, or if a nosy operator or phone company technician is listening.

A long time ago, I helped a co-worker tap his own phone because he suspected his wife of cheating. I gave him a device that would connect to a phone line, activate a cassette recorder when any phone went off-hook, and record the audio. He ended up getting evidence for a divorce shortly afterward.

The "butt set" phones that telco field techs have will let you connect to a line and monitor a call without affecting the voltage, so the comparitor/LED doesn't ensure privacy beyond your family extensions. I still have an old one (with a dial). It's also useful to find the right pair with a flicker test set. I still have a few of those too.

Sometimes a field tech needs to access the CO and will find an unused line on a nearby demark. Long after my phreaking days had passed, a friend of mine had connected a DTMF decoder to his phone line (AC coupled, so it was undetectable). One day he looked at his logs and found that he had recorded a session between a field tech and the CO. The phone number and access codes were his for the taking! Fortunately for the phone company, my friend is mostly a trustworthy law-abiding guy.

This is why you fail. Thirty years ago I could make a wire wrapped 68000k board that did nothing but play music. CE/CS was different back then. I'd cut pins and solder in chips to twiddle the filters on audio output. You could know the entire process from power on to running of your computer and it was easy to change bits even down to the hardware level like adding a 'no place to put it unless you build it yourself' CPU/MPU/RAM upgrade and make it work. Adjust your NTSC video output, just cut that resistor in lieu of replacing it with something really high resistance, it'll be better. Let's build our own new high speed serial port for MIDI. How about a graphics co-processor that only does Mandlebrot calculations, let's build three of them. Only few of the younger generation comprehend the old ways. And the machines have changed to fewer chips and machines have turned into system on a chip. It's a bit of a shame.

Where did one acquire your kind of knowledge outside of a university? Were there any books or USENET groups that you visited to attain it?

You would build a wire wrapped 68000 board in 1992? Isn’t that a tiny bit late to expend that much effort on a 68000?

Not at all. I was still building embedded hardware around 68k 10 years later. There are undoubtedly new products being built around 68k today.

If all you want to do is synthesize music the 68k is perfect.

If you’re taking issue with wire wrap, there just weren’t general purpose dev boards available back then. You were expected to be able to roll your own.

Wire wrap is the most reliable form of construction, used by NASA for many years for this reason - the wrapping of the wire around the square pegs creates a small cold weld at every corner.

Plus when mulitlayer boards were not really a thing, wirewrap gives you all the layers you want, more or less.

Tell them the object system was stolen from Python and they'll really freak out.

Something like `read` gives a better example. Like `man 1 read` is "read — read from standard input into shell variables", "read [-r] var...", a shell function. And `man 2 read` is " read - read from a file descriptor", "ssize_t read(int fd, void buf, size_t count);". You can also get into `man 8 catman`, "catman - create or update the pre-formatted manual pages", "catman [-d?V] [-M path] [-C file] [section] ...". The `catman` is a mirror-like hierarchy of man pages (usually in troff format using the 'an' macro package) pre-formatted for the standard terminal or whatever to shave off a bit of time running roff on the source files all the time.

This is all ancient knowledge and well in place back in the mid 1980's long before Linux or any of that stuff. The `man` page sections used to be different 3-ring binders all printed out sitting on a table in the computer lab. The 'sections' were just different binders of documentation. Get off my lawn!!!