[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Paul Sture]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 14:12:34 +0000, VAXman- wrote:

> In article <4f6527b3$0$9252$c3e8da3$12bcf670 at news.astraweb.com>, JF
> Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
>>Bob Eager wrote:
>>> On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 17:53:39 -0400, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Remember, Unix was written by students at Berkely.
>>> 
>>> You mean the history books are all wrong, and it had nothing to do
>>> with Bell Labs??
>>
>>
>>One of the reasons we can't really know is that everyone was high on LSD
>>back then, so nobody really know who invented it. That is one reason Al
>>Gore was able to claim he invented the internet 20 years later :-)
> 
> BSD, LSD and Al Gore.  Common demoninator: chemical induced
> Schizophrenia.

>From the Unix Hater's Guide (appropriately named ugh.pdf):

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I
don’t think that this is a coincidence." —Anonymous

Source:

http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

This statement is actually false (was the author on the stuff himself?), 
for LSD was invented in 1943 by someone working in a pharma lab in Basel, 
Switzerland:

http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/albert-hofmann-102-invented-lsd/75591/

"Three days later, April 19, 1943, he purposely ingested .25 milligram to 
test the effects. Experiencing more intense hallucinations, he decided to 
bicycle home. Aficionados still refer to the world's first acid trip as 
"bicycle day."

Hofmann at the time worked for Sandoz in Basel, investigating the 
medicinal properties of alkaloids in rye ergot, a common fungus. LSD-25, 
as it became known, was marketed as a psychiatric drug under the name 
Delysid and more than 2,000 research papers were published about it by 
1965. But after Timothy Leary and others began using it as a recreational 
drug, governments around the world banned it and research dried up."

-- 
Paul Sture