Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it
was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone
else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus
claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter
used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete *$ to free up some
disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original
file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing
sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM
helpfully reported `*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'`. It then
started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it
with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.
The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's
office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type
delete *$ twice.
I used that system, Interlisp, the Warren Teitelman version of LISP, on SRI's DECsystem 2060. I had a similar experience. I typed "EDIT" when in the wrong mode, and got "=EXIT" from DWIM. Interlisp terminated without saving.
It really was keyed to Warren's errors. It would try to correct "9" and "0" into "(" and ")", a mistake he apparently made frequently but I never did.
I also used InterLisp. I had a Xerox 1108. The first 5 minutes I used my 1108 my mind was blown when it corrected a typo in a short program I entered and ran.
