From: utzoo!watmath!rtris Newsgroups: net.jokes Title: cookie Article-I.D.: watmath.2979 Posted: Fri Jul 9 11:56:16 1982 Received: Fri Jul 9 23:27:02 1982 A friend of mine is studying something like electrical engineering in Holland. At his school they have an HP3000. The following seems to be a true story. One day the system started to make demands. Every once in a while a message would appear on the operators console: "I want a cookie". The operator would of course ignore it and after a minute or so the system would crash. After some weeks the correlation became clear and systems personnel (all one of them probably) attempted to find where someone (probably a student) had jimmied the operating system code. The operator shortly though found a simpler way around the problem. Whenever the message appeared, he would now type in response: "biscuit", and the system would go away satisfied! Ralph.