SGUB ETAMITLU
Now is the time when I was going to unveil proudly the origin of the word ETAMITLU, the title I gave the ultra-simple word processor described in our Volume 5, Number 4. I’ll tell you anyway, but with a bit of humility mixed in.
People are always boasting about the complexity of their programs, each one of them claiming to be the ULTIMATE. I figured that mine was the opposite end of the spectrum (no, not SPECTRUM), so I’d just spell ULTIMATE backward.
What I didn’t realize was that I included the nearly ULTIMATE boner. While you’re exercising all of your forbearance and charity, and forgiving me, please delete lines 9805 and 9865. These are leftovers from my printer driver software, and have no place in this program–in fact, they crash it.
You can include your own driver software, wherever it resides, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the 37 bytes beginning at 65000. If there is a conflict, just find some other place for the ETAMITLU routine, and adjust lines 9010 and 9875 accordingly.
My rueful congratulations to Earl Dunnington of Boynton Beach, FL, for being the first to call this error to my attention. I could hope he would be the last. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that someone is actually reading my words.
Please, Dear Readers, accept my sincere apologies.
SHRDLU STRIKES
In the old days, when the publishing business involved the pouring of hot lead type, a mythical character named ETAOIN SHRDLU was born. He was named after the sequence of keys on the linotype keyboard–when the typesetter mistyped a letter, he had to fill out the rest of the line before he could clear the machine. The easiest way to do this was to slide his finger across the keyboard, completing the line with the necessary number of characters of Mr. SHRDLU’s name.
All of which is an indirect way of leading up to an apology for misspelling the name of one of our contributors to the March-April issue. The correct spelling on page 4 is R. Arthur Gindin.
Mr. Gindin might take some consolation from the fact that Mr. SHRDLU also misspelled my name, in the Table of Contents. But it’s still no excuse. I’m sorry, Arthur.