Edith

[James A. Landau]

"To err is human.  To really foul things up requires a computer"

I would nominate this for the dozen most famous anonymous computer proverbs.
Oddly I have never heard "foul" replaced by "f**k", despite the obvious
similarities with SNAFU and FUBAR

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"Contrary to what your IBM salesman tells you, the IBM xxxx can't do
everything."

This sounds like a proverb, but it is in fact a practical joke.  There is a
computer program known as "Edith" which has been run on several IBM
computers, hence the "xxxx" above (I first encountered this gag at an IBM
1401 installation.)  First the program prints out on the line printer a
picture of a woman who is fully dressed.  Then it says something to the
effect, "If you would like to see more of Edith, press Enter".  Press or flip
the indicated switch and you get a picture of Edith wearing somewhat less
clothes.  Again, "If you would like to see more of Edith..."  Doing the
indicated gives you a printout of Edith in a bathing suit.  Once again, "If
you would like..."  This time, however, instead of the nude female image you
have been led to expect, you get Edith with her body x'ed out and the words,
"Contrary to what your IBM salesman tells you,..."

(I used to have a complete printout of the Edith program, but I couldn't find
it."

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"The way to recognize something who doesn't know what he is doing is that he
issues orders that simply don't apply to the situation."

I have heard this very useful proverb only once, from my one-time boss at the
Pentagon, Lt. Harold Harrington.  Harrington may have heard it from someone
else, but he definitely had the straightforward-yet-devious mind needed to
have invented this phrase.

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"Iron is cheap, software is expensive".

This version is from a mainframe person, who refers to hardware as "iron".  A
microcomputer person would have said "silicon is cheap".

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WYSIWYG

acronym for "What You See Is What You Get".  Actually not a proverb but an
adjective, meaning that your text and graphics are displayed on the computer
monitor in a precise rendition (or a close enough facsimile) of what will be
printed on paper.

this acronym had about a ten-year life.  It first appeared to describe the
bit-mapped text and graphics on the Apple Lisa (1983) and the slightly later
Apple Macintosh, and then was applied to Microsoft Windows and IBM's OS/2
when they became widespread in the early 1990's.  Then came Microsoft Windows
95, in which you had to work hard to get anything EXCEPT bit-mapped text, and
about the same time or maybe a little later the UNIX community began using
the X-Windows GUI.  This meant that almost everyone who had up-to-date
systems was using WYSIWYG, and since the acronym was no longer needed to
differentiate bitmap and non-bitmap displays, it dropped out of use.

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For some reason our office just received a shipment of cables, which have
been sitting around untouched for a while now.  (Someone commented "Awfully
expensive clotheslines").  The cables come in boxes that are a meter square
with a 30-cm square hole cut out of the middle.  Every time someone comes to
the office, I show them our "square bagels".

                         - Jim Landau