At KSU in 1985 the lab used a VAX 11-780 and the OS was UNIX.  The assignment   
   was to write an AI application as an example of recursion.  When my program   
   crashed, the error message was "shut her down, Scotty, she's sucking mud."  At   
   first I thought a    
   friend who wanted me to quit and go to dinner was playing a joke. Later I was   
   told it was an error message UNIX generated when the condition was undefined.    
   UNIX is a living language and it just told me someone had a nice sense of   
   humor - something to    
   laugh at before going back to the drawing board.    
      
      My first computer was a Tandy 2000 but without graphics or a hard drive so   
   I didn't have the problems mentioned above.  It let me code at home and   
   sometimes compile to test before uploading to the VAX where it compiled, ran   
   and printed the output for    
   me to pick up when i got to the lab    
      
    My first job was Tandy Training and Support in Chicago and I think I got the   
   job because I owned a 2000.  After a year I transferred to N.E. Ohio and soon   
   after the Support department was down sized and we were assigned to our store   
   managers.  Mine was    
   an interior decorator.   
      
        A salesman would sell a toy computer and a suite of accounting software   
   that the toy couldn't run, When I brought this to the attention of the sales   
   manager who was my boss's boss, his reply was, "Make it work!"     
      
        I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the company's   
   ethics.  After reading this thread, I know now it wasn't just the bean   
   counters.       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)