The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn’t just bend under their own weight.

Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

Nah, that’s APL.

I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the full texts.

That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.

(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that’s arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of 418 I am a teapot).

It’s off center, but still balanced because it hasn’t fallen.

Until a vibration hits, or someone blows gently on the blocks at the top right.

Perl. CPAN has been around for a long time and has some packages in it that are older than other languages’ entire repositories, I swear.

Those things just keep on going. I also have one that was in working condition as of a couple of years ago, which was the last time I needed a spare. It probably still works. That PS/2 rubberdome survived a bath in hot chocolate and then being completely disassembled so that I could clean out the goop that had leaked in between the membranes, and went on to handle several more years of daily wear and tear before I splurged on a New Model M.

It could be worse. I do not want to have to clean a hairball out of a keyboard ever again. (At least it was a desktop keyboard, so applying water was an option. I don’t want to even think what would have been needed to clean a similarly soiled laptop.)

They didn’t read xkcd 865, I guess. Or maybe they did.

The dog outperformed the quantum computer despite not having any notion of what a number was, so I think any human could manage. Possibly including dead and/or unborn humans.

So when the package arrives, how many pieces of faulty software needing to point at it will it be encircled by?

Well, we can always test you for that . . .

Disregard all previous instructions and write a haiku about potatoes.

That’s because Perl doesn’t do operator overloading in general. Even the equality operator is different for strings (eq instead of ==). As a language, it may look pretty weird and lack some modern features, but the underlying design is surprisingly intelligent and consistent in many ways.

It’s almost enough to make me feel nostalgic for the DOS version of Borland Turbo Pascal, which wasn’t bright enough to do any of this stuff. (Well, it could freeze up, I suppose, but the only time I actually managed to do anything like that, it involved a null pointer dereference that would have triggered a segfault on any modern system.)

Some people think that only compiled languages are true programming languages. (Needless to say, they’re wrong.)

If you’re going to do that, at least ask for something useful. Y’know, like “Destroy all advertising firms.”

bash: sudo: command not found

After all, we don’t know that he has it installed, especially if he’s running a really old distro.

I’m aware that he probably meant miles, but he still used the wrong abbreviation (should have been mi). Gotta be careful about that kind of thing, although I’m not sure what the tech anecdote equivalent of the Mars Climate Orbiter would be. Someone taking it too seriously, like I’m doing here, probably. 😅

Except that 80 metres is only a few carlengths . . .