On 2026-06-08, Ted Nolan <tednolan> <ted@loft.tnolan.com> wrote:

In article <1780863612-19817@newsgrouper.org>,
Etheromania <user19817@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote:

ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) posted:

How to make Toast:
Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science

Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears
on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product
gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on
the foods they want to cook."

adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An
Intel 80386 with 8MB of memory, a 30MB hard disk, and a VGA
monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking,

Having a really hard time pinning down when this could have been written
When they say Unix 8.3 do they mean Bell Labs Research Unix?
Because by the time VGA was a thing they were on RU-9

The particular page I pulled it from goes back to 2006

https://web.archive.org/web/20060909110208/https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~gogo/humor/hum_toast.html

but I seem to recall seeing from some time well before that.

I dug out the hard-copy books of rec.humour.funny jokes that
I sent away for years ago. I found it in the 1990 edition.
The king had the computer scientist thrown in the moat
in that version, but it's otherwise identical.

It's credited to Paul A. Vixie <vixie@decwrl.UUCP>,
and a heading line reads:

From: TLE::DIEWALD "Means, Motive, and Opportunity 14-Jun-1990 0958"

There are some Donald Trump jokes in the same book.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | No artificial
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | intelligence was
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | used in the creation
/ \ if you read it the right way. | of this post.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:46:09 GMT, Etheromania wrote:

Im not sure why it has an entry on wikipedia in the lions book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Commentary_on_the_UNIX_Operating_System#%22You_are_not_expected_to_understand_this%22

after reviewing it again it doesn't attribute the comment directly
to the lions book and merely explains where to find it.

On page 41 of aforesaid tome:

The question is if the values stored in ?u.u_ssav? at line 2284
are the same as values stored in ?u.u_rsav? at line 2281, how did
they get to be different?

Presumably this is what ?you are not expected to understand? (line
2238) ... clearly ?xswap? should be investigated ... the trail
finally ends at Chapter Fifteen ... in the meantime you may wish
to investigate for yourself so that you may join the ?2238? club
that much sooner.

Sometimes it helps to actually look things up, doesn?t it ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

"Scott" == Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> writes:

Well, there was the Lions' commentary, which was widely
available in
the late 70's and beyond. We actually used a photocopy version
of the
Lions text for a college course in 1979/80.

When I studied Computer Science at the University of NSW in the
late 1980s we studied the Lions' commentary, taught by John Lions
himself.

An entire lecture was devoted to the "You are expected not to
understand this" comment and we were expected to understand it in
detail.

Malcolm

--
Malcolm Purvis <malcolm@purvis.id.au>

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:57:46 +1000, Malcolm Purvis wrote:

An entire lecture was devoted to the "You are expected not to
understand this" comment and we were expected to understand it in
detail.

You mean, ?you are not expected to understand this??

At a wild guess, I?d say that the reason that the data restored from
the stack is not (necessarily) the same as was saved onto the stack
was quite simple: they were process-specific stacks belonging to
different processes.

I?ve written context-switching code like this myself, though not in an
actual OS kernel ...

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.15
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?= <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:57:46 +1000, Malcolm Purvis wrote:

An entire lecture was devoted to the "You are expected not to
understand this" comment and we were expected to understand it in
detail.

You mean, ?you are not expected to understand this??

At a wild guess, I?d say that the reason that the data restored from
the stack is not (necessarily) the same as was saved onto the stack
was quite simple: they were process-specific stacks belonging to
different processes.

While it's been a long time, the reason is related to swapping the
u area on context switch, which contains the process stack.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.16
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)