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Comment by prdonahue | Hacker News Reader

Random Dennis Ritchie story: my high school principal was Dennis' brother, John, and had a "UNIX Magic" poster (https://i.imgur.com/aqg21UI.jpg) hanging in his office.

I asked him what that was about and he dismissed it with a wave of his hand, as if annoyed: "oh, just something my brother did".

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Wow, I was that high school principal, John Ritchie. I was always proud of that poster, and very proud of brother Dennis. Maybe I was in a bad mood that day, but was never annoyed by Dennis getting any attention--though both UNIX and C were beyond my powers of comprehension. Sorry about the misunderstanding.

Welcome to HN!

Wow, good to hear from you! Hope post-LSRHS life has treated you well.

To be fair, I was there complaining about something as teenagers are wont to do so I probably put you in a bad mood :)

Someone posted a high res scan of this on reddit if anyone else is interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/91ntoh/comment/e3...

Unfortunately no scan of the other two (feuds and views).

Here someone find a more permanent place for it: https://send.firefox.com/download/c1783a94da0e8cfa/#sklTlfgc...

It says it's in the owner's trash now for some reason!? I want this so bad.

Alas, "File is in owner's trash".

High res version is inaccessible there.

Seeing how the image link has expired, here's a decent one: https://i.imgur.com/qMN1are.jpg

I have a copy of Views! Away from home for a few days but I can post pics of the three posters when I make it home.

Hey, I would appreciate that. Thanks.

If you get a chance, please post it to the TUHS/COFF mailing list, it would be greatly appreciated.

If you can't, do you mind if I crosspost it there?

Ooh, I'd love to see that - if I'm not mistaken, the third one is Feuds (or Wars?).

I would love to see this as well :)

Here's the image from the Google Cloud link:https://mega.nz/file/0ZVzmACS#Ve-io92zJoXX1DMHO_-2hIr125OQuj...

It's high quality, but it seems satured if compared to other photos. Maybe someone with the skills can fix that?

The jars the wizard has at hand, and the scroll (“shell script”) are familiar looking things like “null”, “tar”, “uucp”, “diff”, “awk”, “C”,... but “oregano”? Is that a joke or a codename or some deprecated tool?

The image also has a cat.

And the “B” container is cracked, indicating they’ve moved on from B to C, and there’s a spool of thread (process threads?) - lots to enjoy, but oregano is still a mystery.

Possibly a reference to /{usr,var}/spool.

if it is a reference, this is probably more likely than process threads, since 'threads' as a native construct were a mid/late 90s addition to unix systems

Also a fork, a broken pipe, a boot and I guess that's a log on the right.

above the magician, one can see a lot of pipes.

The Wizard's hat is labeled "su" and the huge shell that everything is mixing in is brilliant. Also note the pipes on the ceiling. This is amazing.

Oregano is still around!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano_%28software%29

That ‘Oregano’ probably belongs to the wrong decade, if not the wrong century. A thread on comp.unix.wizards suggests that it is a reference to a Berkeley developer caught crossing the US–Canada border with a bag of oregano — that was actually oregano.

Oops. Yeah you're right. Wrong century millennium, no less!

They do mention the circuit simulator, SPICE in that same thread. But still, not this oregano for sure.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.unix.wizards/kFdPoJBpcS...

"Kaffee : It was oregano, Dave. It was ten dollars' worth of oregano.

Lieutenant Dave Spradling : Yeah, but your client thought it was marijuana.

Kaffee : My client's a moron. That's not against the law.

Lieutenant Dave Spradling : Kaffee, I have people to answer to, just like you do. I'm going to charge him.

Kaffee : With what? Possession of a condiment?"

Electrical circuit simulation [1] ... didn't know about this myself either, but noticed its still available in the Ubuntu repo and installed it.

EDIT: just noticed the comment by user kps in the sibling tree - might not be the software since it is too recent to be on the poster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregano_(software)

John Ritchie was my high school English teacher! After I chose something about computers as a topic for some essay, he asked me if I knew what Unix was. I did not.

Looking at his magical artifacts floating in the air, he appears to be incanting some sort of USB driver.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/USB_icon...

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