The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #173023   Message #4195704
Posted By: VirginiaTam
18-Jan-24 - 07:05 AM
Thread Name: 2024 Obit: Gary Owens aka Gnu
Subject: RE: 2024 Obit: Gary Owens aka Gnu
GNU in Discworld (Going Postal, The Clacks coding)
“G” means that the message must be passed on, “N” means “not logged”, and “U” means the message should be turned around at the end of a line. (This was also a realworld tech joke: GNU is a free operating system, and its name stands, with recursive geek humour, for “GNU’s not Unix”.) The code causes [the person's name] to be repeated indefinitely throughout the system, because: “A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.”

GNU Gary Owens (aka Gnu)