Do you know what RGF means? And Dressner wines

F

Frank Deis

Frank Deis
I used the term RGF to describe my recent cable installation, and the person I was telling about it didn't know what it meant. I realized that maybe it is a rather circumscribed term and I want to ask if anyone here knows it? I think maybe you had to be doing computers in the seventies or something like that to "get it." If you are on the right track you will know that it is, more or less, a synonym for "snafu." It is certainly one of the more picturesque synonyms for this and I could imagine an elaborately illustrated children's book or manga with an RGF as the central theme. Well, it would be an X-rated childrens book.

At any rate in my great quest to acquire all of the MODCONS more or less simultaneously, we went out to a T-Mobile store in Piscataway on Centennial Ave near 287. We had a rather long frustrating time getting a cell phone for my wife, and then I said, "hey, there's a wine shop!" This was in a rather low rent invisible location, I can't imagine who shops there, but as I looked around I had a growing feeling of recognition that this would be a place to revisit. Several of the wines had the Louis Dressner label on the back, and when I saw bottles of the 2006 Clos Roche Blanche "Touraine" I realized I was going to have to buy a few bottles. And they had a friendly case discount as well (25%). I asked the manager, an Indian guy, how he made his selections, evidently "a service" brings the wine in, it's not the manager's choice. There was some very neat stuff including a couple of "approved" cru Beaujolais and some decent Muscadet.

I haven't opened the CRB but we had a young Bourgogne Rouge from the shop with roast chicken last night and we were both very happy with the match.

SO what is RGF? I will reveal the answer but I want to give you guys a day or two first.

Frank
 
So, Slaton, how did you know this, where had you heard it?

A rough debug or a difficult frustrating time consuming process of any sort is a "Royal Goat Fuck"

The abbreviation is nowhere on Google but if you Google the phrase you can see it is used in many situations, for example Lebanon was a "Royal Goat Fuck" politically.

Certainly my cable installation was a RGF -- I was leaning out of a tiny window in my attic dangling a rope toward the balcony where the cable guy was standing to grab the end and tie it to the cable. And the snaking was kind of endless and terrible as well. He was really exhausted when he left.

Frank
 
originally posted by Joe Dressner:
All our wines in Piscataway are fraudulent.
Click to expand...

In fact there were a lot of "sounds like" wines including something called "The Silex" or something like that. I was a little excited until I picked it up and had a look.

And the back label may have said "Lewis Dresner" -- would that be right???

F
 
A guess? I can see guessing F***

I might imagine the "Royal"

But GOAT?? I think anyone who thinks of goats must have heard this at some point in the past.

What are your hobbies, Slaton? Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Or more to the point, have you ever handled a Hollerith card?

F
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:
I think maybe you had to be doing computers in the seventies or something like that to "get it."
Click to expand...

Frank,
I've been "doing" computers since '70, and I've never run across that term. Having spent most of the '70s and early '80s working on Digital machines, my preferred term for those scenarios was "fubar," which is well-known to most. (The connection to Digital, for those not in the know, was the use of the filename foo.bar in most of their documentation.)

Mark Lipton
 
Thanks Mark, it was just a hypothesis. Of course I have heard FUBAR many times.

I suppose if I analyze where I heard RGF it might trace back to MIT or the Rand Corporation.

The latter might account for the political usage of the phrase.

F
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:

But GOAT?? I think anyone who thinks of goats must have heard this at some point in the past.

What are your hobbies, Slaton? Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Or more to the point, have you ever handled a Hollerith card?
Click to expand...

Frank,
A second point of puzzlement: I've handled plenty of Hollerith cards, but WTF does that have to do with goats? I'd imagine that Slaton's goat cue was the current use of goatpr0n in many situations, such as the well-known site goatse.cx.

Mark Lipton
(Those Christmas Islanders must be one fun bunch)
 
Hollerith was just part of my original hypothesis...

As part of this ModCon experience I am taking apart an old desk, and I actually refound some of my old programming cards. Most of my students have probably never even seen one.

F
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:
A guess? I can see guessing F***

I might imagine the "Royal"

But GOAT?? I think anyone who thinks of goats must have heard this at some point in the past.

What are your hobbies, Slaton? Have you ever been convicted of a felony?

Or more to the point, have you ever handled a Hollerith card?
Click to expand...
I'm a Unix sysadmin. Need I say more?

Hollerith is off my radar, but on the subject of felonies, my lawyer has advised me to say nothing further.
 
So, a computer dude after all.

I have a dim recollection that in the early decades of the Computer Age, IBM thought along the lines of the "razor blade" economic model. Before stainless steel blades came in, the idea was that you sold the handle for just about nothing and made your money in the long run on sales of the razor blades, which could only be used a couple of times before getting perceptibly duller. Cell phones seem to operate along the same lines, in that the cost of the phone is near zero at the beginning and the monthly fees are where they get rich.

What I recall is that for years they made tons of money on the cards, which must have been proprietary.

Getting into computers in 1963, I have to say that it gave me a sort of God-like feeling when I first bought a Commodore 64. Full Screen Editing!!! You didn't have to deal with one line at a time. I went through the "TECO" phase too, it was more or less a nightmare. No cards but everything was on paper and the computer was somewhere across campus. "Print Line 52" or whatever, looking for the mistake.

I don't miss the cards any more than I miss my sliderule.

F
 
originally posted by Frank Deis:

What I recall is that for years [IBM] made tons of money on the cards, which must have been proprietary.
Click to expand...

You need to keep in mind that IBM began as an adding machine company and cards (dating from the Jacquard loom*) were a central part of that business. Herman Hollerith, inventor of the card-driven adding machine, started a company (Tabulting Machine Company) that later merged to become IBM. His patent on punched cards issued in 1889, so unless he was able to extend it, it would have expired before the founding of IBM in 1911.

I don't miss the cards any more than I miss my sliderule.
Click to expand...

I'm with ya, Frank. One of my nightmare jobs (fantasy division) was "card punch operator." I'm glad that I got to work with them a bit, though, as they are a window into an earlier era of computing, now forever lost. One of my most cherished memories in this regard was working one summer for the Federal Gov't with a guy who'd been a technician on the Eniac project. That, and working on an IBM 360 -- Serial No. 3 -- at a time (1978) when Nos. 1 and 2 were in the IBM museum and Smithsonian, respectively.

On a related note of computational nostalgia, check out this interesting Ebay item

Mark Lipton

* I was very amused when shopping for a tablecloth at Printemps and Galeries Lafayette to see Jacquard loom tablecloths sold for high prices. Apparently, the low resolution of the designs is now a desirable feature?
 
How many people today really know what a "core dump" is?

For only $495 you can do your own core dump right in your ***********.

Actually it could be viewed as art...

Thanks for the eBay tip.

F
 
While the patent on the punch cards was expired, IBM tried to extend their monopoly by requiring that customers use IBM punch cards (that were presumably more expensive than the "generic" version) or lose their warranty (I think). They eventually lost an antitrust case on this in 1936.

Cole
 
My first exposure to full-screen editing was Hazeltine. The Comp-Sci majors got to use them, while the Engineering majors stayed on punch cards.

I used that Hazeltine to submit MUSIC jobs to WYLBR running on an IBM 3032.

It is a compelling bit of grandpa's tales but I don't miss it one bit. Ahem.

(And seeing a real core dump goes with knowing how to pronounce 'abend'.)
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
My first exposure to full-screen editing was Hazeltine. The Comp-Sci majors got to use them, while the Engineering majors stayed on punch cards.
Click to expand...

Funny that you should mention Hazeltine. My first CRT experience was the Textronix 4010, a storage tube terminal that requried manual refreshing. The next step up for me was a brand spanking new Hazeltine CRT terminal hooked up to a screaming fast 9600 BAUD line. Wow, those were the days...

Mark Lipton
 
..I might as well join them.

I was taking a computer science course at Cal Poly SLO back around 1975 or 1976 and was getting relatively adept at programming punch cards to run COBOL on an IBM 360. One Mondy afternoon the instructor (a rotund gentleman from India) walked into the class and told us that he'd attended a computer seminar south of San Francisco the previous weekend. Over the course of the weekend he was shown something called a "personal computer" and that by his reckoning, within a couple of years this "personal computer" would be powerful enough to replace the big IBM and that everything we were being taught would be useless.

He added that despite technology, we needed to complete the class so we'd have to finish up our punch card hell, mainly because we'd have to be graded on something, lest the school authorities find fault with his prescience.

It was about ten years later when I purchased my first "personal computer". It was (of course) a beige Mac Plus, with its mighty 2 mgs of RAM. I've continued to purchase Macintosh computers over the years; I think I've owned about 15 of them in various configurations. I don't miss the punch cards one bit (byte?), and I'm in awe of people who have the patience to do programming.

-Eden (as OV Wright sang, "I don't do windows")
 
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