There's actually a little more to the story than that. On 2007-01-09, I
wrote to David Tilbrook:
Hi David .. I came across a web page
(http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247) investigating the source of the
following quotation:
"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use _____.'
Now, they have two problems."
The author of the site seems to have gone through a lot of trouble to
hunt down the original author of the quote. The best he was able to do
was discover a Usenet sig from 1988 attributed to "D. Tilbrook."
I was wondering if this was you -- if so, I think you should contact the
author to set the record straight. His post was recently linked from the
news aggregator site Reddit, at
http://programming.reddit.com/info/xlov/comments and quite a few people
have been reading the story and discussing the quote.
He wrote back:
I can lay claim to being the author, but I cannot remember when or where
I first used it.
Zalman Stern worked for me at CMU so may have quoted me, hence the
attribution to him.
Actually one of the funnier incidents regarding my "famous" quotes was:
"Software is the only business in which adding extra lanes to the
Golden Gate bridge would be called maintenance" -- David Tilbrook -
circa 1981
I was at a meeting when the speaker used this quote and attributed it to
David Parnas -- I was appropriately indignant.
-- david
P.S.: Do we know each other?
The answer to his postscript was no. :)
And he later replied again to add:
By the way, I think I coined the phrase at a European conference in
Dublin circa 1985.
I was talking about the difficulty maintaining portable software when
supposedly "standard" tools (e.g., awk(1)) differed from system to
system.
Then later someone pointed out to me that it was appearing in various
signature lines which I suppose led to its being spread.
I forwarded it all to Jeffrey Friedl (the author of the linked post), but I
guess he figured the comments already did a good job covering the story, or
maybe he wanted to get explicit permission from David to repost the emails
but never got it. But I think David's reply is interesting and compuhistoric
enough that I don't want it to die in my GMail archives -- and so I'm
posting it again here.
And he later replied again to add:
I forwarded it all to Jeffrey Friedl (the author of the linked post), but I guess he figured the comments already did a good job covering the story, or maybe he wanted to get explicit permission from David to repost the emails but never got it. But I think David's reply is interesting and compuhistoric enough that I don't want it to die in my GMail archives -- and so I'm posting it again here.