You are toast

This page developed from a discussion during October 2002 in INFO-VAX involving Nic Clews, Tom Cole, Doc.Cypher, Robert Deininger, Alan Greig, Bob Koehler, Paul Sture, and William W. Webb

If SAP made toasters

The manual to run the toaster would be approximately 10,000 pages long. The toaster would come with 2,500 switches which would all have to be set in an exact pattern and in a precise sequence in order to toast specific kinds of bread. Each pattern would be established by SAP's experts as the "Best Practices" method of toasting that kind of bread. It would take a team of basis and functional contractors about 1 year to configure the toaster in the best manner and then another 6 months to test it. In the meantime your entire family would need to attend extensive training classes on how to use the new toaster. In order to support end users and consultants, MIT would establish a list-serv for people to post questions and answers regarding toaster set-up and operation. Of course, the online help would randomly pop up in German. But once it was running (if ever...), you'd get the best toast in the world.
Bread made from flour, or containing quantities of flour milled from certain varieties of grain would be incompatible with the toaster no matter what the settings, so you'd either have to re-engineer the varieties to fit in with the settings, or just not use them.

If IBM made toasters

They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.

If Xerox made toasters

You could toast one-sided or double-sided. Successive slices would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread for you.

If Oracle made toasters

They'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home you'd discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.

If Hewlett-Packard made toasters

They would market the Reverse Toaster, which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.

If Sony made toasters

The ToastMan, which would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, can be conveniently attached to your belt.

And, of course: If Microsoft made toasters

Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still have to pay for it anyway. Toaster '95 would weigh 15000 pounds (hence requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.

If Apple made toasters

It would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, but 5 years earlier. It's so intuitive to use it comes without any instructions, so you have to visit usenet and buy a few books to find out how to use it.

If Linux made toasters

Anyone could build his own toaster from the spare parts in the garage, but people would still pay money for pre-built toasters. All the parts would be user serviceable, and the design plans would be freely downloadable. Instead of the complexity of having to push a button, you would simply type something like

toaster --toast_lightness=Urk --bread_type=0x963939

The toaster would burn your toast by default, but once you enable the don't_burn_my_toast feature in /etc/toaster.conf (as described in the TOASTER-RTFM-HOWTO, which sends you to a least one README file, which in turn sends you to yet more, and at least an hour or two's worth of surfing - you need to get online first) it would toast reliably for years.
People who eat Linux toast say that it is better than Windows toast.

If Fisher Price made toasters

"Baby's First Toaster" would have a hand-crank that you turn to toast the bread that pops up like a Jack-in-the-box.

If The Rand Corporation made toasters

It would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the box would be highly classified government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about it.

If the NSA made toasters

Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of national security.

Does DEC still make toasters?

They made good toasters in the '70s, didn't they?

If VMS Engineering made toasters

You'd put your bread in it, press a button, and the 75 watt heater would turn it somewhat brown before it popped up. To change the darkness try the following code extracted from sys$examples:dec$toast.f90

 include '($toastdef)'
 
 newdark = tt$k_dark_medium
 status = sys$assign("TOA0:",chan,,,)
 if (.not.status) call exit(status)

 status = sys$qiow(,%val(chan),%val(io$_setmode.or.io$m_darkness), &
                     iosb,,newdark,%val(4),,,)
 if (.not.status) call exit(status)
 if (.not.iosb(1)) call exit(iosb(1))

where TOA0: would be the toaster template device as follows

Terminal TOA0:, device type unknown, is unplugged, heated, slice-oriented
    device, darkness control, device is a template only.

    Error count                    0    Operations completed  0
    Owner process                 ""    Owner UIC             [SYSTEM]
    Owner process ID        00000000    Dev Prot              S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G,W
    Reference count                0    Default butter size   80

Further improvements add cluster support for TOA0, since customers in large cartering companies asked for a way to toast their bread in a uniform way, which in the end caused the following situation:

• Every major vendor will suddenly declare that they support "real" toast clustering, with ads involving a glass room full of alleged toast clusters and a helium balloon floating nearby. Most of these vendors do not understand what a cluster is.
• Many of these will actually be rack mount systems where a bunch of unrelated toasters sit on shelves, sharing a common cooling system. These are "tightly bolted, loosely coupled" toast clusters.
• A few will support a shared analog buss, i.e. they are all plugged into the same power strip. This is "enterprise-wide resource management" for toast clusters.
• VMS will support the idea of any user anywhere requesting toast based on characteristics and will be given cluster-wide access to shared toasting resources.
• After a spate of confusion, Tru64/HPUX will start supporting TruToast, which works almost as well as VMStoast clusters, but is much harder to administer, requiring commands like

         sudo tstctl -g brnt -proxy 10.0.1.5 -uLMzf spread.ar
  

  You will also have to install RFS (the rye file system) to get this to work right on Unix.
• A number of other vendors will poopoo Non-Uniform Toast Architectures and then suddenly produce NUTA-based systems of their own, but admit that they can manage the contents of a Toast Building Block but don't really scale them well together outside a quad-slice configuration.
• Microsoft founder BillG will "turn the bagelshop" in a herculean test of corporate will, and redefine toast clusters to mean systems that are only backends to .TART, which you can only really use PopTarts(r) as an end user, no matter how much your breakfast looks like pumpernickle.

If the Franklin Mint made toasters

Every month, you would receive another lovely hand-crafted piece of your authentic hand-crafted Civil War pewter toaster.

If Cray made toasters

They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other single-slice toaster in the world.

If Thinking Machines made toasters

You would be able to toast 64,000 thousand pieces of bread at the same time.

If Timex made toasters

They would be cheap and small quartz-crystal wrist toasters that take a licking and keep on toasting.

If Radio Shack made toasters

The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.

If K-Tel sold toasters

They would not be available in stores, and you would get a free set of Ginsu knives.

If University of Waterloo made toasters

They would immediately spin-off a company called WatToast.

If Sun made toasters

The toast would burn often, but you could get a really good cuppa Java.

If Tandem made toasters

You could make toast 24 hours a day, and if a piece got burned the toaster would automatically toast you a new one.

If Price Club made toasters

They'd be really cheap, as long as you bought a six-pack of 'em.

If Next made toasters

They would be the most beautifully designed toasters in the world. Unfortunately, there would be no way to get the bread inside. Ultimately, Next would stop selling toasters and decide instead to make bread that could be used in other toasters.

If SGI made toasters

Well actually, they did. But they called them O2 and the slot in the top was for CDs.

Comments to: Martin P.J. Zinser
Last modified: 20021115