All,
The new RFC 3092 on "Foo" has already got praise from a number of readers.
See complementary information about MIT "Foo Counters" below.
I identified the need for such a document about 2 years ago, but it kept on
being too far down on my priority list.
In late 2000 I was contacted by Donald Eastlake, who suggested he could give
me hand with the project, and he took over the main editorship.
When Donald was checking round if we could reference text from various
sources, he stumbled upon Eric S. Raymond, well known evangelist for Open
Source and author of books like "The New Hacker's Dictionary" and "The
Cathedral & the Bazaar". Eric not only approved of using some quotes from
his works, but also offered to become a co-author. You can find out more
about Eric at: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/
Some of the originally proposed text was dropped in the process to make sure
that we kept it on a professional level, but this is probably the only RFC
so far that uses the term 'Fucked Up...'.
Carl-Uno
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Russell [mailto:stever@nohau.com]
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 1:20 PM
To: Donald.Eastlake@motorola.com; manros@cp10.es.xerox.com;
esr@thyrsus.com
Cc: tmrc-talk@MIT.edu
Subject: More on "Foo Counters" in RFC 3092
Hi,
I applaud your exhaustive reference on "Foo". I have a footnote to the
quote in the third paragraph of page 3.
Sometime in the period of 1954 - 1958, I visited Boston and saw a "foo
counter" in an MIT student's room. I got the schematic and built one. It
was my impression that this was often done and that the name "foo counter"
was the common name for this kind of device.
The foo counter consisted of a line of NE-2 neon lamps wired as relaxation
oscillators and powered by a 90V battery (commonly available in the days of
vacuum tube portable radios). The lamps flashed with different periods
giving the impression of a binary counter counting very rapidly.
The normal usage was to leave it around somewhere where it would invite
questions. If the questioner seemed sufficiently naive, they would be told
that the device was counting "Foos".
Steve Russell
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Steve Russell mailto:stever@nohau.com
Software Engineer http://www.nohau.com
Nohau Corporation phone: (408)866-1820
51 East Campbell Avenue fax: (408)378-7869
Campbell, CA 95008
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