[FRIAM] hacker koan

[Carl Tollander]

Minsky was simply illustrating you cannot avoid programming without
preconceptions.

Another:
--------
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off
and on.

Knight (Tom Knight), seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "
You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of
what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.
--------
As a general strategy for fixing things over the phone, this strategy works
much of the time.   However, in this case, the point would be that the
machine was always "working".   The joke here is that in those days in most
of the Lisp Machines (at least our Symbolics ones) all the boards had at
least a few jumper cables, and that no two  boards had quite the same
jumpers, yet they "worked".  Another is that we often turned off the GC and
ran them til they ran out of memory, then power cycled.

So preconceptions are conserved; sometimes in one machine, sometimes in
another.

C
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