A couple of New York Perl Mongers were discussing time machines today. One said he'd go back to 1998 so he could buy the right dot.com stocks. His whole purpose was to get the largest ROI. I said he should go back even further and buy something like IBM.
But, I also thought that simply getting a lot of money wouldn't be the right thing. What if you could do something else that didn't make you rich, but made the world a better place. Would you get to IBM right before Bill Gates sold them DOS? Maybe you'd show up at Xerox Parc and tell them not to talk to Steve Jobs but to do it themselves. You could convince DEC that the world market for computers was somewhat greater than 6. I could take Randal out for a beer and steak dinner on the right night so he didn't bother to get into trouble, or patch Perl 1 to have a switch statement.
What would you go for: playing the market or changing history?
DMR alledgedly said:
I'd spellcreat(2)with an "e".
-Dom
Re:Dennis Ritchie had it right...
rafael on 2005-03-09T09:13:06
Don't forget HTTP_REFERER.Re:Dennis Ritchie had it right...
drhyde on 2005-03-09T10:57:08
I'd find Messrs K & R and ever-so-politely ask them to make their portable assembler as easy to program with as a non-portable assembler.Stop Dennis Ritchie earlier
n1vux on 2005-03-15T19:12:26
How about preventing Bell Labs from pulling out of Project MAC, so that
- Dennis and Ken and co. would have stayed in Cambridge and not moved back to N.J.
- thus Unix wasn't necessary
- K & R invent the pipe shell over the existing Multics pipe(3) primitive instead of building it on Unix;
- Multics became the ubiquitous, secure 36 bit O/S it should have been, with combined support of GE/Honeywell and Bell Labs;
- the i386/486 would have really run a 32-bit desktop version of MULTICS (as it was designed for) instead of Win3 and Win32/S.
- and thus Win32..XP would never have existed
- and all later operating systems have proper security built in, since Multics had it to begin with.
Disclaimer -- I am not a multician, but some of my best friends are.
Ob Perl re Multics
n1vux on 2005-03-15T19:26:21
And of course, the connection from Perl to Unix to Multics and then back to Perl is through MJD. http://perl.plover.com/perl67.html
Re:Why not both?
brian_d_foy on 2005-03-10T14:29:13
It's an either-or question because that's how I posed it and those are the sort of answers I was after. Which one would you choose?Re:Why not both?
Aristotle on 2005-03-10T15:06:51
Changing history, then.
Each player gets two random objectives, either one of which counts as their personal victory conditions. One is to restore the arc of time to the time-line they were born on (draw an ID card); the other is to collect 3 artifacts (draw a Mission card: General Merchandise - General Patton's chrome helmet, General Grant's whiskey, General Tso's Chicken [not a real example, only one of those is actually in play]). With a better quality time-machine (suitable interupt card), you can "Get there First" and steal an artifact that someone else just grabbed, etc.
