Thursday, December 03, 2009

Dot Plan from 1995

Before the inter-twitter-facebook-blogweb, or whatever you kids call it, there was Finger. Finger was cool because only geeks knew about it. You'd post your status to your .plan file and people anywhere in the world could type "finger some-obsure-userid@some-obsure-host.edu" to see it.

It was like blogging, but with an even slimmer chance of having an audience. Great stuff.

Anyway, I was rooting around my old account at csh tonight and found this my .plan:

class CS2

creation
brain_washing

feature -- Global variables

student: STUDENT
clean: INTEGER is unique
warped: INTEGER is unique

feature -- Main program

brain_washing is
do
from
!!student.make
student.mind := clean
until
student.mind = warped or world.end_of
loop
student.io.putstring( "EIFFEL is Good%N" )
student.io.putstring( "Don't worry that your executables " )
student.io.putstring( "are usually over 20,000 times larger " )
student.io.putstring( "than the source code.%N" )
if student.resists then
student.attend_lecture
student.attend_lecture
student.attend_lecture
student.attend_lab
end
end -- loop
end -- brain_washing

end -- CS2

Clearly, this is an important digital artifact to preserve.

By posting it here, I feel I have played an important role in format migration for future generations. Thank you.