Dave VanHorn started it with:
> Meanwhile, the governments of Earth followed the principles
> laid down by Alfred E. Neuman.

So, Carl Denk offers:
> Early 1960's, University of Michigan, high level programing language was
> MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), similar to Fortran. Alfred's picture
> was on the manual front cover. Machines were IBM 650 (vacuum tubes) >
> 709 > 7090 (Transistor). There was a punch card deck to print out on the
> noisy line printer Alfred's image. :)

At which point I open my big mouth:
> I had heard that the image came out when there was an error.  I suspect
that may be an
> urban-legendish retelling of the system you describe.  Especially
considering that the
> amount of work expended in printing an image probably exceeded that of
the
> compiler + program being run.  Nonetheless, I have remembered this story
(I heard
> it in 1972) and I have a 2 color (b&w) image of A.E. that I made and
sometimes put him up
> on the LCD I'm writing a driver for.  Considered having him appear after
an error but never could
> quite find a good excuse for it.

Carl couldn't resist adding:
> I'm sure it took a lot of resources. I caught hell from my Structural
> Engineering computing professor for adding the Alfred deck to the end of
> my last homework assignment. Almost got an "F" instead of an "A" in the
> class. That was just before graduation.

I'll post my response in a following message, so you guys don't have to
scroll down to find it.
--=20
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