I read an article a long time ago that drew a direct correlation between the need to contain/separate livestock in the American West and the battlefields of World War I.
Basically, as settlers moved westward, they needed to contain their livestock as well as separate sheep and cows. Sheep apparently eat grass down to the ground whereas cows don't, thus sheep would deprive cows of food.
So, barbed wire was developed for this purpose and the military saw the utility of it as well. Fast-forward to WWI and the vast battlefields there and needing an inexpensive way to slow enemy advances on foot. This led to the development of tanks to overcome the barbed wire obstacles. Machine guns also became more useful as a way to spray large areas when attacking troops were held up by the obstacles.
This page intentionally left blank.
(Well, not completely blank, since the above non-empty disclaimer
appears on the page. What is meant is that this page is devoid
of meaningful content related to the rest of the document. This
page serves only as a separator between sections, chapters, or
other divisions of the document. This page is not completely
blank so that you know that nothing was unintentionally left out,
or that the page is not blank because of an error in duplication,
or that the page is not blank because of some other production
problem. If this page were really blank, you wouldn't be reading
anything. This page has not been left blank by accident, but is
left non-blank on purpose. The statement on the page should say
"This page was intentionally left non-blank".)
My favorite was with two sides of a blank page in a document. One side read "This page is intentionally left blank", and the other side read "This page isn't."
Plot twist: the "blank page" hides internal information and a parting employee's rant against the boss in an official company publication and you only find out weeks later because of strange search engine results.
Back in the mid 90s, I spent a full year migrating my company and ~800 users across six sites from Exchange to Notes. I had no experience with Notes, and absolutely hated it when I started the project.
After a year of hacking, learning from mistakes, and countless hours of RTFM, we got it done. Email, calendar, file shares all migrated, cross-site replication, and some really great new features added in with workflows. I was really proud of it.
As soon as the last migration wave was complete, I called my manager to let him know that the long-awaited day had arrived. Exchange was dead, long live Lotus Notes! Literally, during that phone call he said "Ummm. Yeah. We are going to migrate back to Exchange because of some M&A coming up."
I remember a sysadmin at the company I worked at in 2006(?) remarking that this would be the third time he had migrated to and then away from Lotus Notes.
“…and I almost forgot ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay. We ahh lost some people this week and ah, we sorta need to play catch up.”
It's not so well known that one of the original rationales for "offside rule" programming languages is that it works just as easily for handwritten code as it does for typed.
Will we ever have programming languages that are primarily designed to take input from whiteboard grabs? (ie where not only handwriting, but also placement, connectivity, and maybe shape are meaningful?)
