Harry Ohlsen
6/17/2005 7:01:00 AM
Twenty odd years ago, I was sitting in front of the console of a Unix
system, using nroff to write a paper for uni.
Since the printer was in the same room, and I was the only person there
(it was about 0300) I was just piping the output of the nroff command
directly to it.
After having successfully done this four or five times, I ran another
nroff command to print the latest copy for proof reading ... then I
waited ... and waited ... and waited.
After about five minutes, this came out on the line printer:
The world will end!
As you can imagine, this freaked me out just a little. At that point, I
decided that the last version I had was good enough :-).
It wasn't until about five years later, when I was reading the eqn
manual ... eqn is the filter that formats mathematics for nroff ... and
saw the following:
"All rows of the matrix must contain the same
number of columns, or the world will end"
It took me about ten minutes to stop laughing.