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Bill Pechter said... | |Was that a case of programmer cute or did some mamanger spec the running |man icon or was it an internationalization... Instead of running |we'll use a world wide recognizable symbol? I had the distinct impression that it was something somebody just did, and someone liked it, and it took off. Management may have wanted something, and this fit the bill, or a crucial series of someones may have just gone, "Oh. Cool. OK." (I think that is what happened.) Believe it or not, in the early 90s, that wasn't too unusual at IBM, at least in Austin. Among other things, that's where AIX on CD instead of tape came from, where support for xdm and the font server and in fact almost all the standard X apps came from. CMVC grew out of an in-house project. It was a pretty awesome time to be at IBM. Most of the folks had even started treating contractors like people. [I was a contractor. xdm and the font server were unsupported, but the guy responsible for them worked on them like they were. I convinced my manager that they were important, we added serious testing to the Product Verification Test suite, and next thing we knew, IBM realized they weren't an albatross, but a feature!] The original running man was *extremely* slow, and ate up a lot of the CPU. He also fell down a lot. And was often wrong about whether he should be falling down or showing off his muscles. Of course, this was well before it was even Alpha code... (Hey, this was 1992! Can we talk about this here???) -Miles