[NBLUG/talk] System Message

S. Saunders sms at sonic.net
Wed Feb 16 08:53:52 PST 2005


On Wed, February 16, 2005 12:01 am, Mitch Patenaude said:

> Another interesting footnote... back in the old days when large
> machines had multiple users

<g>
The "old" days?

FWIW, "large" machines *STILL* have multiple users.  Note that
these "large" machines are often no more than ordinary workstations
(but often sans-monitor, but also RAM-max'ed), accessed by telnet/
ssh/etc.

Unless I'm sadly mistaken, our own sonic.net (who IIRC hosts nblug
servers) runs such a machine, known as "shell.sonic.net" and I've
been at more than one employer over the past 5 years who had similar
boxes.

This isn't counting the folks who have thousands of (e.g.) e-mail users
on one mbox-server.


> setting the ticky-bit on your tty was a
> sign you wanted to go in on pizza delivery, which is why it is
> occasionally still called the "pizza bit".  Maybe this was only a UC
> Berkeley thing, but I thought it was common practice.

A brief go-round with Google would suggest not... "pizza bit" gets
hundreds of hits, but most ("most" = "all on the first 3 pages of
results") seem unrelated to UNIX's "sticky bit".  If I search
  UNIX+"pizza bit"
I get *TWO* hits, one in Norwegian & one on "pizza bit music".

And, speaking as a statistically-invalid and strictly anecdotal datum,
I've been using UNIX since '80 (including at Sun Micro), and haven't
met the "pizza bit" usage before (tho it's clever!).


- Steve S.






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