From: Harry Ohlsen <Harry_Ohlsen@...>
Date: 2005-06-17T16:00:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Way Off Topic Re: Funniest Thing Evar!

Twenty odd years ago, I was sitting in front of the console of a Unix
system, using nroff to write a paper for uni.

Since the printer was in the same room, and I was the only person there
(it was about 0300) I was just piping the output of the nroff command
directly to it.

After having successfully done this four or five times, I ran another
nroff command to print the latest copy for proof reading ... then I
waited ... and waited ... and waited.

After about five minutes, this came out on the line printer:

     The world will end!

As you can imagine, this freaked me out just a little.  At that point, I
decided that the last version I had was good enough :-).

It wasn't until about five years later, when I was reading the eqn
manual ... eqn is the filter that formats mathematics for nroff ... and
saw the following:

    "All rows of the matrix must contain the same
     number of columns, or the world will end"

It took me about ten minutes to stop laughing.