[Stratoscope]

Back in the day, maybe 30-40 years ago, when possession of any amount of cannabis could get you thrown in jail, we needed a code phrase to use when we called a friend to ask if they had any.

So we would ask:

"Do you have any programmer's fuel?"

Also related, the phrase "fire an event" is a cannabis reference:

https://retool.com/visual-basic

[mistrial9]

captain crunch would say "execute a nine-N instruction".. ask Woz! also the frat guy coders at Apple would openly hate on Andy Hertzfeld, who insufficiently hid his affection for an occasional toke in Palo Alto

[Stratoscope]

I was friends with John Draper (Captain Crunch) in the 1970s.

But never as close a friend as he wanted me to be! (Anyone who knew John or the stories about him may know what I am referring to.)

He usually had some decent pot, so when I ran out, I would sometimes visit him at his Berkeley apartment and we would smoke and do some Forth hacking.

I never heard about the "nine-N instruction" though.

I ran into John again at the Computer History Museum's Homebrew Computer Club reunion in 2013. When I re-introduced myself, he didn't seem to remember me at first. Then his eyes lit up and he asked, "Did we work out?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/

[mistrial9]

... after he moved back to California from Hawaii

[DonHopkins]

You and I discussed this before -- the phrase Draper used was "Let's execute some 1802 instructions". And yes he creepily and obnoxiously insisted on back exercises with me too. Yech! Beware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

Back in the days of the SFRaves scene, I and others would always keep some tobacco on us a "John Draper Repellent" in case he saddled up and tried to schmooze some weed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26040778

Stratoscope on Feb 5, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Dunfield 6809 Portable

> Sign extension (SEX instruction!)

We were definitely into SEX in those days.

In the late 1970s I was working at Tymshare, and one of my tasks was maintaining the assembler and linker. (I think this was on the PDP-10 but it could have been another machine.)

We wanted a "weak external" feature, somewhat akin to a "weak reference" in modern languages: instead of failing to build if the external symbol was not defined in another object file, it would link OK but leave a null value that you would check at runtime.

The assembly directive for a regular external was EXTERN. I thought of calling the weak external WEXTERN but that looked silly. So I decided to call them Secondary Externals, with the directive being SEXTERN.

And as far as I know, no one complained!

cjak on Feb 6, 2021 | next [–]

I just finished a project that introduced features for both signal injection and signal extraction. So now we can enjoy both SIN and SEX, sometimes at the same time.

DonHopkins on Feb 6, 2021 | prev [–]

The 1802 had a SET X REGISTER (SEX) instruction, as well as a GET HIGH (GHI) instruction.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/computeii/issue3/page52.php

John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) once creepily invited a friend of mine (who was a strapping young lad at the time) into the back of a van to "execute some 1802 instructions".

Stratoscope on Feb 6, 2021 | parent [–]

Ah yes, I knew John well in those days. Not nearly as well as he wanted to know me!

We used to drive around in his VW microbus finding interesting payphones. Then when he was learning to program, I visited him once in a while at his place in Berkeley to help him with his code.

My motivation was that he usually had some decent weed. Then one time he asked if I wanted to "work out". That lasted about two minutes until I found out what he really meant.

Many years later, I ran into John at the Homebrew Reunion. He didn't recognize me at first, so I reintroduced myself and mentioned how we used to hang out and write code.

His eyes lit up and he asked, "did we work out?"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/

[Stratoscope]

Don, thank you for the trip down memory lane! I had forgotten about the "1802 instructions".

I like that John Draper Repellent idea. You don't even have to smoke it, just the sight of the Evil Weed should do the trick.

[mistrial9]

as linked below, 1802 instruction set, "GET HIGH BYTE OF Register N" binary encoding had a "nine" as the first byte of the binary opcode, so the phrase was "Get 9N" or "Get High (byte)" instruction.. "execute a 9N instruction" was "get high" ..

no info on that other stuff mentioned (!)