Email: Just Another ARPANET Quick Hack
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson slapped together an email program as a side hack to ARPANET, choosing '@' to separate user from host simply because it wasn't commonly used. He didn't consider it very significant. Fast forward: email is now humanity’s main productivity killer. Thanks a lot, Ray.
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UFS on Solaris: Fragmentation Funhouse
Sun's UFS (early '80s) ran Solaris and BSD beautifully—until filesystem fragmentation reduced performance to a crawl. Solaris admins became filesystem defrag specialists, balancing between scheduled downtime, slowdowns, and tricky snapshots. UFS lives on, fragmented and stubborn, in legacy UNIX gear everywhere—because nostalgia always triumphs over sanity.
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COBOL: “ALTER” — Self-Modifying Nightmares
COBOL programmers of the '60s and '70s gleefully abused the "ALTER" verb, allowing programs to rewrite their own code at runtime. Debugging became surreal, because code execution paths changed themselves mid-flight. Self-modifying COBOL code was like changing your car’s steering wheel while driving—it rarely ended well.
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The Infamous Morris Worm: The Internet’s First Own Goal
In November 1988, Cornell grad student Robert Tappan Morris unleashed the first major worm onto the fledgling internet, allegedly "just experimenting." Morris's worm rapidly crippled thousands of UNIX servers through exploits in sendmail and finger daemon, causing an unprecedented denial of service. After the dust settled, Morris got slapped with...
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Btrfs: “Better FS,” or “Butter Disaster”?
When Chris Mason announced Btrfs ("Butter FS") at Oracle in 2007, Linux fans cheered the promise: checksums, snapshotting, RAID, and all the ZFS goodies without licensing headaches. After years in "stable-ish" state, however, its appetite for random, thrilling corruption episodes kept it largely confined to hobbyists and the brave (or...
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Ksh: The Forgotten Aristocrat
Korn Shell (ksh), courtesy of David Korn at Bell Labs (1983), was once the elite’s shell—fast, elegant, and packed with powerful scripting features. Sysadmins appreciated its robustness and speedy execution of scripts. Problem: AT&T licensing nightmares stunted its popularity early on, and GNU-friendly Linux distros largely ignored it. Today, ksh...
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