The May 1996 issue of the UM IT Digest (the farewell to MTS issue) under the heading "Some Days Were Better Than Others" told this story:


This was before my time, but I had heard a similar story elsewhere.  But the story I remember was a little different. The person involved wasn't a "professor", but someone on the Merit staff, possibly Dick Wagman.  And I'm not sure that the problem was at the Operators' console.

Don Boettner has a better memory than I do:

Andy Goodrich and Mike Alexander remember this pretty much the same as Don. Mike says it didn't have anything to do with the operators' console and he suspects that there were a few rebates given out that day.

[Bernie, Dick, Don, Andy, Mike, and I (Jeff) are or were all from UM.]

I don't think I ever saw this myself, but Don Boettner confirms that in the early days of MTS, if you tried to use the $DESTROY command with a device rather than a file name, you'd get the message "IBM frowns on the willful destruction of hardware".

For a time at least the MTS Editor had a "jjj" command that when entered would respond with "Take a break". According to Andy Goodrich who added the command, "jjj was Jill Janice Jackson, who when Clark Lubbers would get riled up would always say 'Clark, take a break' ".

And before the justify command was implemented in the MTS editor, entering the command would give the response "No way Tolkin". Again according to Andy, this "was a play off of Don Boettner's place holder for commands, which was 'Not yet, Rosen, not yet', because Bob Rosen was always asking him for new commands. Steve [Tolkin, a member of the UM Computing Center staff] bugged me for the justify command, so I put in the initial response for it before the code was there, but only for Steve's userID."

For Scott Gerstenber's userID (WSG.) when lines were deleted from a file, the editor would display "1 line is pushing up daisies" or "<n> lines are pining for the fjords" rather than the usual boring messages that the editor displayed for everyone else.

And I remember:

Grelber started out as a program. It think it came from UBC. Later it was added as an option on the $DISPLAY command. Grelber is the insulting inhabitant of a log in the enchanted forest in the Broom-Hilda comic strip and on TV. Some examples of GRELBER and JOKE output are included below.

Only $DISPLAY GRELBER and $DISPLAY JOKE are still present in MTS, c. 1996. Although if I remember correctly, a few of the jokes had to be edited or removed because they were considered to be in poor taste.

And this next item isn't a joke or a bug, but ... :


[Don, Andy, Clark, Steve, Scott, and I (Jeff) are or were all from UM.]

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Still more stories

In the stories that follow Ralph and Jon are from UBC, Gavin is from UM by way of Durham.

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Ralph remembers ...

From: Ralph Sayle Date: November 6, 2010 4:26:00 PM EDT
To: Jeff Ogden
Subject: Re: GODZILLA is invincible and cannot be destroyed?

Grelber and Joke were UBC additions...

As I recall, $Disp Joke started as a joke. I was rewriting Msgcc and added a @joke operator as a joke for GREadie. Somewhere I had found a file of jokes which I saved for the future. Since @joke was a joke, it didn't stay in Msgcc. Gone but not forgotten as it reappeared a few years later in the Display command.

Grelber came about from a little fun program written by JNightingale to randomly put phrases into a sentence. ARunnals spent a bit of time to generate the vocabulary and thusly we had The Grelber who was willing to insult anyone at the touch of an "enter key".

MHayward, who wrote FullScreenMessage ($FSM), was a bit "upset" at the thought of the computer insults, so he generated a Nice vocabulary. "My but you are a most wonderful person in the whole universe".

As usual, there was an internal joke so if it was MHayward who did the $Disp Grelber, it dropped into Nice mode. <Fame>

Later I heard they were ordered to be removed by a UBC manager as they were "unprofessional".

Hey! Poor jokes!!!! That's a bit unfair...  [how about if I change it to read "mostly poor jokes"? -Jeff]

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Gavin remembers Jon Nightingale's automated trip reports

From: Gavin Eadie
Date: November 6, 2010 5:46:21 PM EDT
To: Ralph Sayle
Subject: Re: GODZILLA is invincible and cannot be destroyed?

Was it the aforementioned JNightingale who went on vacation leaving Grelber to 'send back' daily trip reports ?

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Jon isn't here to defend himself and Ralph remembers some more

From: Ralph Sayle
Date: November 6, 2010 9:26:02 PM EDT
To: Gavin Eadie
Subject: Re: GODZILLA is invincible and cannot be destroyed?

Yes it was JNightingale or as we call him, Jon...

He left and the messages started to show up; Spent the night in scary motel in St Helena but I did have an excellent moose sausage salad in a corner store/gun shop.

Then the messages started to get weird as if he was aimlessly lost in America, bouncing from coast to coast or border to border.

Then, I think, *Autostart conked out or Jon came home.

I think he then sold his program to the government & they still use it to generate press releases.

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$DISPLAY JOKE

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$DISPLAY GRELBER

The JOKE and GRELBER example output above was produced on MTS by Gavin Eadie on 7 November 2010. Thanks Gav.

The stories that follow are all from Josh Simon's "Michigan Terminal System: Anecdotes" Web page.  I think all of them are true. Do others agree?

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Spelling Lessons and More

Electronic mail was handled by the $MESSAGESYSTEM. Since the University of Michigan was (and still is) an institution of higher learning, $MESSAGESYSTEM insisted that you spell correctly. The $MESSAGESYSTEM command RETRIEVE was used to retrieve your messages from the master database. (Like cc:Mail and some other e-mail systems, each message was stored exactly once, and your mailbox contained pointers to those messages you sent or received. Once a message had 0 recipient-pointers and the Sunday evening purge rolled by, the message was removed from the system completely.) However, if you misspelled the command, you would be admonished:

#$MESSAGESYSTEM RETREIVE NEW
 Didn't your momma ever tell you: I before E, except after C?
#

Unfortunately, in the very late 1980s, this feature was removed in the name of increasing friendliness to users. RETREIVE became a synonym in the $MESSAGESYSTEM command grammar for RETRIEVE. However, the *KERMIT program did correct your spelling well into the 1990s.

At one point, $MESSAGESYSTEM also provided lessons in polite conversation:

#$MESSAGESYSTEM FUCK
 Tsk, tsk, you'll never get to medical school with language like that.
#

[This option is still present in MTS, c. 1996.]

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Time

You could ask the system for the time ($DISPLAY TIME), date ($DISPLAY DATE), or both ($DISPLAY TIMEDATE), and it would tell you. However, for people who had trouble with the concept of digital clocks, you could ask for it in analog:

#$DISPLAY TIMESPELLEDOUT
 The big hand is on the four and the little hand is just past the twelve.
#

[This option is still present in MTS, c. 1996.]

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*PizzaDelivery

There was a program on MTS called *PIZZAZDELIVERY that was ostensibly a way to order pizza delivery from several local merchants, using the "MTS dollars" you'd been alotted for CPU time to pay for it. It would go completely through an order process, and even print out a receipt. Many, many students waited in vain outside a computer site for their pizza...

[I vaguely remember that *Pizzadelivery only existed on or around April 1st. -Jeff]

[You could get a pizza delivered to the UM Computing Center or NUBS without too much trouble, but you had to use a phone to place the order and you had to use your own real money to pay for it. -Jeff]

(Submitted by Ray Ingles.)

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Which Host on Halloween

While not strictly related to MTS, it is a Merit Network anecdote.

When you connected to the Merit computer network (the network of universities, colleges, and schools within the state of Michigan, connected to what was then known as CICNET in the Midwest; Merit was later known as MichNet), you received a Which Host? prompt. This was your instruction to enter the name of the remote host you wanted to connect to (such as UM for UM-MTS or UB for UB-MTS). On October 31st, however, in honor of Halloween, the prompt was changed to Witch Ghost? (This was later scrapped as it caused automated scripts that looked for "Host?" to fail.)

[We can't really remember if the "Which Host?" prompt was changed to "Witch Ghost?" or to "Which Ghost?".]

[Picky note: MichNet was the name of the statewide network in Michigan operated by Merit. Neither the Merit Network nor MichNet were connected to CICNET. Merit and CICNET shared a connection to NSFNET in Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan and Michigan State University were members of both Merit and CICNET, later MichNet and CICNET shared high-speed leased data circuits between Ann Arbor and East Lansing. -Jeff]

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Editor Fun

While in $EDIT mode, typing "computer" at the editor command prompt would elicit the response "working!". This was actually documented, somewhere, as being there to test the operation of the edit mode command parser. [Or perhaps it was really a tribute from Viktors Berstis to the original Star Trek TV series?]

[Sadly this command and message are no longer present in the MTS editor, c. 1996.]

(Submitted by Jonathan Sell and Lyndon Nerenberg.)

This message is still displayed in MTS, c. 1996.

There are several stories on Josh Simon's "Anecdotes" page that I recognize, but I didn't recognize this one and wondered if it was true. It still isn't clear.

Tom Valerio and Don Boettner both believe that this story is true.  Don also points out that $DESTROY #GODZILLA, where # is the file name character, would allow the invincible GODZILLA to be destroyed without the need to rename. And I'd guess that putting the ccid explicitly on the front of the file name would work too ($DESTROY ccid:GODZILLA).

George Helffrich, Andy Goodrich, Mike Alexander, Alan Ballard, and I don't remember this. We know that MTS c. 1996 does not operate this way. Mike Alexander searched the MTS D2.0 to D5.0 distribution "tapes" looking for the string GODZILLA and didn't find anything. Mike also looked at the source code for the $DESTROY command in these distributions and didn't see anything along these lines.

So at this point it is unclear if this is a true story or an urban legend.  Personally I'm leaning toward urban legend.

[Tom, Don, George, Andy, Mike, and I (Jeff) are or were all from UM. Alan is or was from UBC.]