Devil's Advocate

From Unix Review, December 1994, page 102

AI Lives #67

     Following my repeat of cat Jimmy_Hoffa and similar UNIX/AI oldies (September 1994), Frank Muennemann of Varian dares me to relate his own AI experiments. Muennemann has been typing make love on various platforms with riveting results:

     I think the classic response is the one I get from dgux, hpux and Microsft NMAKE. This also seems like the most appropriately old-fashioned:
      Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.
     Microsoft NMAKE adds that it's a "fatal error U1073" to not know how to make "love."

     On my more adventuresome Linux-powered workstation (which has GNU make), I get:
      make: *** No rule to make target 'love'. Stop.
     It's open to speculation how target love relates to puppy love, true love, and what Linux might do with its rule if it had one.

     The SunOS make seems despondent about its inadequacies:
      make: Fatal error: Don't know how to make target 'love'

     In a similar vein, Jim Carroll of e-Commerce Inc. tells me of a TCP/IP connectivity tool that uses the examples hostname "elvis" and then fulfills our wildest dreams:

$ ping elvis
elvis is alive