The Magic Story

Years ago, I had a printed copy of The Jargon File and spent many happy hours reading through it. If you haven’t browsed through the file, you should. It’s full of screamingly funny tidbits about our Hacker Culture and Language.

My favorite entry, by far, is A Story About Magic that tells the tale of a seemingly magic switch glued to the frame of a PDP-10 in the MIT AI Lab. One day, Guy Steele happened upon the switch that had its two positions labeled “magic” and “more magic.” The switch was in the more magic position but had only one wire attached to it and was therefore electrically non-functional.

Go read the story to find out what happens when Steele flips the switch. To this day it’s still not definitely known how it worked.

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