Back in the mists of time around the beginning of my computing career,
I was working in London for Data General, a minicomputer company that
is no longer with us. And one day one of my even younger colleagues
came over to ask how much Latin I knew. Not much, I admitted. A few
useful phrases like Caveat emptor and
illegitimi
non corborundum, which I know isn't even real Latin. But why
did he ask?
Turns out he'd been playing a ancient chess program on our office
mini. And when he'd beaten it, it had terminated with the
Latin-sounding message, OFLIDEA AGNI. Hence the question.
I remembered vaguely something about how early DG minis had been
little endian (keeping the bits and bytes in right-to-left order in
words in memory, rather than left-to-right as God intended). And I
had the inspired thought that maybe something had been messed up
during the program's translation to more modern (at the time)
hardware. Sure enough, reverse every two characters in OFLIDEA
AGNI and you get a more appropriate message for a program that
had just been defeated.
Which is also the name of this album. And which is irrelevant to that
album. But I like the story and just had to share.
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