{"id":2381,"date":"2003-02-18T12:54:38","date_gmt":"2003-02-18T15:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=287"},"modified":"2010-05-09T18:17:25","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T21:17:25","slug":"a-fire-at-some-geek-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2003\/02\/18\/a-fire-at-some-geek-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fire at Some Geek Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recent news<\/a> about the threats to Comdex have reminded me of similar tales from the last years of Comdex’s precursor – the NCC (National Computer Conference), in the late 1980’s. I have fond memories of the May ’84 NCC, when I bought the first 128K Macintosh<\/a> – complete with second 400K floppy and ImageWriter printer. It cost $2495 for the system, plus $495 each for the printer and floppy.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I also remembered a humor piece<\/a> I wrote 5 years ago for MacKiDo<\/a>. There are some dated references, so I think it’s time to update it. Any references to real persons, institutions or phenomena are strictly satirical and do not necessarily represent my real-life opinion; also, my disclaimer<\/a> of course applies. And if I inadvertently spared anybody, please tell me \"icon_wink.gif\"…<\/p>\n

There was a fire at <some huge computer conference>…<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

When it reached the main exhibition hall:<\/strong><\/p>\n

– The Windows 95 users asked the door guard to close all windows and restart the exhibition.<\/p>\n

– The Windows 98 users loaded their installation CDROMs to look for a Windows Extinguisher Wizard\u2122.<\/p>\n

– The Windows NT users said the fire would probably be fixed in the next service pack.<\/p>\n

– The Windows XP users were asked to reactivate their installation “due to hardware changes”.<\/p>\n

– The Mac OS 9 users clicked on everything in sight to see if that would affect the fire somehow.<\/p>\n

– The Mac OS X users were awed at the cool transparency effects displayed by the fire.<\/p>\n

– The OS\/2 users reminisced about the much more full-featured fire that burned down the OS\/2 User’s Conference in 1994.<\/p>\n

– The mainframe users pulled the “emergency stop” handle and waited for the field engineer to arrive.<\/p>\n

– The former BeOS users commented on how their own fires had been much faster and more efficient.<\/p>\n

– The Unix users tried connecting all the stands together with pipes to build a fire engine.<\/p>\n

– The SCO users sniffed that the exhibition hall obviously wasn’t POSIX compliant.<\/p>\n

– The Linux users searched the Internet looking for the hall’s source code so they could find out why it caught fire.<\/p>\n

– The Amiga users decided there was no fire and went on doing whatever they were doing.<\/p>\n

When the fire reached the developer’s hall:<\/strong><\/p>\n

– The C programmers started looking for a NULL pointer.<\/p>\n

– The Delphi programmers sneered that this would never happen at a Delphi developer’s conference.<\/p>\n

– The C++ programmers argued about which design pattern a Fire Engine template should follow, and whether the hall’s construction was fully ANSI-compliant or not.<\/p>\n

– The Objective-C programmers tried to change the fire’s behavior, but fought on whether categories or poseAsClass: would be the best way.<\/p>\n

– The Assembly Language programmers started to write a very detailed and optimised treatise about firefighting techniques.<\/p>\n

– The ADA programmers alleged that the fire was not in their original specifications.<\/p>\n

– The FORTRAN programmers began muttering about “COMMON something”.<\/p>\n

– The COBOL programmers started prowling the hall and looking for Y2K bugs.<\/p>\n

– The Visual Basic programmers asked the C programmers to write a “fire” module for them.<\/p>\n

– The .NET programmers commented favorably on the fire’s fully-distributed architecture-independent implementation.<\/p>\n

– The Java programmers attributed the fire to a faulty VM implementation.<\/p>\n

– The Python programmers promptly set fire to another hall in a much more elegant way, with fewer lines of code.<\/p>\n

– The Perl programmers blamed everything on a subtle fault in the implementation of regular expressions.<\/p>\n

– The PHP programmers hacked the fire’s code to do syntax highlighting.<\/p>\n

When the fire reached the press room:<\/strong><\/p>\n

– The ComputerWorld reporter wrote “Microsoft Fire(tm) takes the conference by storm”.<\/p>\n

– The PC Magazine reporter wrote “Blazing 3-D effects herald a new era in computing”.<\/p>\n

– John Dvorak wrote “Duh. Deadly dull conference, second-rate fire. Who do they think they’re kidding?”<\/p>\n

– The Business Week reporter wrote “Apple’s market share is further reduced by conference fire”.<\/p>\n

– The Wall Street Journal reporter wrote “High-tech stocks may burn in the near term”.<\/p>\n

– The Washington Post reporter wrote “Fire may be a cyber-terrorist act”.<\/p>\n

– The MacAddict reporter wrote “Bill Gates should have been here when the Main Hall collapsed”.<\/p>\n

– The MacWorld reporter wrote “Steve Jobs takes the stage with unheard-of pyrotechnics”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recent news about the threats to Comdex have reminded me of similar tales from the last years of Comdex’s precursor – the NCC (National Computer Conference), in the late 1980’s. I have fond memories of the May ’84 NCC, when I bought the first 128K Macintosh – complete with second 400K floppy and ImageWriter printer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-2381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-humor"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-Cp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}