Fun in OpenVMS

Since only a limited number of three letter abbreviations does exist some of the ones used in OpenVMS are bound to sound familiar....

CIA

Compound Intrusion Attempt (or Audit)
E.g. displayed during startup of the security server as

 %SECSRV-I-CIASTARTINGUP, breakin detection and evasion

KGB

Key Grant Block

NSA

Non-discretionary Security Auditing

FUBAR

Failed Unibus Address Register

Other funny occurances in the OS include the Microfortnights unit of measurement as in this SYSGEN output from OpenVMS VAX 7.3

$ mc sysgen show timepromptwait
Parameter Name            Current    Default     Min.     Max.     Unit  Dynamic
--------------            -------    -------    -------  -------   ----  -------
TIMEPROMPTWAIT              65535      65535         0     65535 uFortnight

There is actually even a description of this unit in the SYSGEN help, the relevant part looks like this:

SYS_PARAMETERS

  TIMEPROMPTWAIT

       ...
       (The time unit of micro-fortnights is approximated as seconds in 
       the implementation.)

The full help can be found here. Now for the nitpicking type of reader it should be noted that one microfortnight is actually 1.2096 s ( 14*86400/1000000 ), so this is a pretty rough approximation. For the sake of accuracy really a micro-twelvenight (1.0368 s) would be a better unit (especially around christmas ;-)

Also the source code is reported to contain some not so serious comments:

• Hairy code, like its author
• If the lights go out, does the shadowset dissolve?
• What city, plez?
  This one is part of the directory services SYSAP on older versions of SCS.

Some of them might even not be suitable for minors, so please use your discreetion.

00000A58   20998 ; DK_MOUNT_VER
00000A58   20999 ; 
00000A58   21000 ; The disk class driver and mount verification are in bed together.
00000A58   21001 ; They are so initimately related that one of them is most certainly
00000A58   21002 ; "with child" and nuptial announcements will soon be made.
o

Comments to: Martin P.J. Zinser
Last modified: 20020304