Welcome to the Lounge

OriginalGriff wrote:

poor-quality mobiles

dandy72 wrote:

OTOH, it took a Microsoft support engineer to point out to me that my Lumia 640 was actually considered a rock-bottom device with little RAM for the OS to work with, because I've very rarely run into some operation that seemed to take an unreasonable amount of time to complete. The UI's always remained fast, fluid and responsive, and I've never had to touch anything twice because I thought it hadn't registered the first time around.

Tim Carmichael wrote:

It's one of the phrases that has crept into common use.

The use of foo in a programming context is generally credited to the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) of MIT from circa 1960.[1] In the complex model system, there were scram switches located at numerous places around the room that could be thrown if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board. When someone hit a scram switch, the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word "FOO"; at TMRC the scram switches are, therefore, called "Foo switches". Because of this, an entry in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language went something like this: "FOO: The first syllable of the misquoted sacred chant phrase 'foo mane padme hum.' Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning."[5] One book[which?] describing the MIT train room describes two buttons by the door: labeled "foo" and "bar". These were general purpose buttons and were often re-purposed for whatever fun idea the MIT hackers had at the time, hence the adoption of foo and bar as general purpose variable names.