And then there are the few lines of innocuous-looking code preceded and followed by comments like

***DO NOT ALTER THIS CODE!***

I've seen this in production systems. No documentation, of course...

Well I have, since being taught COBOL in 1973 at a New England telephone company. Wonder what Big Balls and the others will do when they encounter an ALTER statement...

I'm not sure even DoD funding for this would be safe any more.

I was in o it's Advanced R&D group in 1979-80. I remember COP-420 microcontrollers and as little hardware as possible. Every resistor mattered, when there were pennies to be saved.

Isn't " 'Do whatever you like' zone" a straw house... um I mean a strawman?

Just waiting for GM to find a dealer to host the transaction. I've already accepted their signed offer. Expect I'll buy another EV in the next few years.

Who at /. comes up with... I mean thinks up... those things? I have great, ongoing appreciation for them.

I read the first two sentences of the story excerpt aloud to my husband. Our kitchen-table-top Echo Dot then cheerily announced through its external speakers: "Shuffling songs by Rick Astley!" So thanks to Amazon Prime I now know that Astley recorded more than just THE song...

An official diagnosis (which I got 23 years ago at age 46) can provide the excuses you mention - but it doesn't have to. An individual's awareness of their own profile of cognitive strengths and weaknesses can lead them to seek workarounds for, or make extra effort in, problem areas. Other people's informed awareness can lead them to try meeting an autistic individual halfway in reaching understanding; a useful strategy in general. Neither of those sound anything like a retreat...

Ironic that this directive comes from someone posting as an AC...

Amazon just recreated the Automat! Anyone else remember them from New York City?

The "FE" refers to the onboard Fire Extinguisher.

It was run in a TI portable terminal with a 300-baud acoustic coupler, dialed into the PDP-11. Caused considerable loss of productivity...

...there's JCL.

Bought in the fall of 1977 IIRC. Had an 8080A running at 1MHz. With 48K of RAM, the thing cost $1850 at a time when low-end cars were like $1995. Used to like playing Target, but the Star Trek game was impressive too. Getting game sound through an AM radio placed near the motherboard was cool! (Yes, that was by design.) Also got a Computalker speech synthesizer board and turned the SOL into a text-to-speech talking terminal with software I wrote in 8080 Assembler. Followed by an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 1200, then an Amiga 600. Then finally in 1995, a Packard-Bell running the brand-new Windows 95... and so on.