Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The inventor of the Write-Only-Memory finally speaks

Hidden in anonymity since 1972, he finally tells the tale of how he created his legendary spoof:
I worked at Signetics as an engineer from about 1967 to 1979. One of my tasks in the Signetics MOS marketing group was to create data sheets for new products.

I wrote the 25120 WOM data sheet, copyrighted in 1972, as a lark to see what a Signetics WOM specification might look like.
WOM = Write-Only-Memory, a joke datasheet for a chip where you could write data but not read it.  Note that from a security perspective, this is pretty much unhackable ...

For those of you who don't have a yellowing photocopy of this stashed away in a manila envelope, here it is:


4 comments:

  1. Backwoods EngineerDecember 17, 2014 at 2:42 PM

    Somewhere, I have a yellowed photocopy of this. It was still circulating when I was a young engineer in the mid 80's. This was considered high humor among engineers then, though ROFL had yet to be coined.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ASM826December 17, 2014 at 3:48 PM

    The earliest known dated use of ROFL is March 30th, 2004.

    http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/roflcopter

    ReplyDelete
  3. SiGraybeardDecember 17, 2014 at 6:22 PM

    Is there a link to said genius' name?

    (ob acknowledgement - I had a copy for years. I think my first copy was in 1978.)

    ReplyDelete
  4. drjimDecember 18, 2014 at 1:04 AM

    From Wikipedia:

    The datasheet was created "as a lark" by Signetics engineer John G ‘Jack’ Curtis

    ReplyDelete

Remember your manners when you post. Anonymous comments are not allowed because of the plague of spam comments.