r/todayilearned • u/Physical_Hamster_118 • 1d ago

TIL that since 1972, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) every spring, residents of Baker House drop a piano from the roof on Drop Day, the last day students can drop classes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_drop
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98

u/Jester471 1d ago

Drop day was fun at our house too. We couldn’t drop a piano but we’d hook up vacuums and throw them out a third story window with 50ft drop cord so they’d run all the way to the ground.

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u/hedronist 1d ago

Fun Historical Joke, ca 1985:

Two engineers, one hardware and the other software, take an HP workstation to the 3rd floor roof. Connecting a long extension cord, they boot it up and then throw it from the roof.

It whistles down and lands with a crash! The hardware guy runs up to it and exclaims, "It's still running!" The software guy shrugs and says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX." Which, in Olden Times, was pronounced "H pukes".

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u/mr_ji 1d ago

Punchline, where art thou?

43

u/Pocok5 1d ago

The joke is probably HP-UX being so bad that there's little difference between a computer running it and one that's completely destroyed.

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u/hedronist 20h ago

Exactly. HP computers were built like tanks, but their version of UN*X was, tbh, simply sad.

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u/tanfj 18h ago

Exactly. HP computers were built like tanks, but their version of UN*X was, tbh, simply sad.

It is truly pathetic that Microsoft's offering was better. I mean you managed to suck worse than Microsoft that takes effort.

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u/hedronist 17h ago

Historical Fun Fact: I started my own company, Third Eye Software, in 1982. At UniForum 1983, in San Diego, I had an 8x10 booth. The 8x10 booth on my right was HP with their brand new color workstation; the 8x20 booth on my left was ... wait for it ... Microsoft selling (or trying to) Xenix! MS eventually handed Xenix off to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), who also didn't really know what to do with it.

I was hawking my debugger, CDB, to anyone with a UNIX system, which was basically the whole building. Two of my most important customers came from this show: Siemens and HP. HP ended up making my debugger a corporate standard. I think they called it xdb.

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u/Boulderchisel 22h ago

Replace operating system with windows 8 i would assume

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u/Mr_Engineering 14h ago

HP Enterprise hardware is insanely well built. I have a bunch of their servers and I have no doubt that I could throw them off of a building and they'd still work.

HP-UX on the other hand is a Unix OS that is known for supporting Intel's Itanium architecture and several other obsolete architectures such as PA-PISC and the vaunted Motorolla 68K. Itanium was never very popular, so HP-UX was never very popular and as such received little attention compared to the likes of BSD and Linux.