Over the last year or two I’ve been on a bit of a kick of reading the original sources for several common CS (or other) topics. You’d be surprised about how many ‘oft quoted’ concepts don’t have the origin you’d expect.

There is an old joke:

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

Which I found at the above quoted ‘guppylake’ website¹. However, when I found the CSCW ‘92² scan of the same article the quote itself is missing (and the text differs in other slight ways as well). All other references to the quote drastically postdate both of the previous references.

The Wayback Machine only first finds a reference to guppylake in 2008 despite originating in 1996.

I ended up emailing³ the author and asking about this discrepancy. Here is what we found out:

1. The quote was included as a footnote in the original article, which was probably submitted in 1995
2. The footnote was apparently omitted from the CSCW publication! If I ever knew about that omission before your message today, I had forgotten it! I thought it was published at the time! Lucky for me I had kept the original, because…
3. An an archive of the original publications was put on guppylake.com in the 2000’s based on the author’s copy rather than the CSCW copy.
4. The original was put up on thumper.bellcore.com but amazingly the wayback machine doesn’t seem to have much captured from that important early net site.

References