Was like finding an old friend in an unlikely place. "When I first played Adventure, finding 'xyzzy' in it " taught by math teachers the world around Ron Hunsinger believes there is a more meaningful origin to the Magic word to make it happen, and he just made one up.Īntecedent nor is it an acronym or anything like that." What the idiom means: he devised this little pseudo-puzzle and needed a "As for 'out of whole cloth,' I meant just "Will Crowther says he made up the term out of whole cloth when he was Says that he was unaware of any special meaning for the word: Or was there some hidden meaning? There are two storiesĪ friend of Crowther's at the time Adventure was originally coded, Other phrases from the game such as ".you are in a twistyįound in computer documentation, classroom discussions, andīut where did XYZZY come from? Is it totally a nonsense word, String of consonants is still a part of the vocabulary Has propagated widely throughout both academia and the computing myġ2-year-old daughter could be reading your messages insideĪ day." Martin Heller, Windows Magazine, July 1, 1994. The term 'XYZZY' from the Crowther and Woods Adventure game In a later 32-bit version, this was amended to: "Twice as much happens."Ī number of people in various states have personalized license plates "XYZZY."ĭo you have an XYZZY license plate? Let me know! Named "XYZZY." In the original 16-bit version, the response was: "Nothing happens." Then a tiny dot will appear at the top left corner of the screen that willĬhange color depending on whether the cursor is over a bomb or not.ĭata General's AOS/VS operating system had an undocumented command Type xyzzy, followed by ENTER and the right SHIFT key. There's a cheat code for Windows' "Minesweeper" game: Happens.' So far no one has complained about our little joke." With the response from the satellite decoded on the Of course, we couldn't resist calling the Verify the uplink/downlink path without changing On our current project, we needed a 'NoOp' "I work on software for small satellites here at Goddard SpaceĬenter. It's still there to this day on the latest printers. One brief flash of lightning later I entered XYZZY and the printer responded with "Meta Guru mode ON."Īfter rebooting the printer I entered XYZZY in Fingerprint interactive mode and the printer responded with "Nothing happens." I had to see what commands survived in the XP platform and to my surprise in one of the SYSTEM commands I received the prompt "Enter Meta Guru password:" These were flash ROM-based machines whereas the UBI printers used ROM chips and battery backed RAM. Intermec came out with what is known as the XP series of printers (no relation to Windows XP) which had faster processors and more memory. None of this was documented for the developer community. SYSTEM 0, SYSTEM 10, SYSTEM 20 and SYSTEM 40 did things like memory dumps, listing loaded modules, etc. There were "SYSTEM" commands of the form SYSTEM and a number in the interactive part and SYSTEM 1138 had some special meaning. These printers use a basic-like language called Fingerprint. UBI was bought by Intermec in the 1990's and Intermec was bought by Honeywell a few years ago. I have worked with United Barcode Industries "UBI" programmable bar code printers for many years. Magic word 'XYZZY' The Colossal Cave Adventure page
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