20 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
20 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
one-banana problem
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n. At mainframe shops, where the computers had operators for routine
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administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tended to look down on the
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operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It was
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frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys
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could be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task.
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A one-banana problem is simple; hence, It's only a one-banana job at the
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most; what's taking them so long? At IBM, folklore divided the world
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into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures had
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different hierarchies and divided them more finely; at ICL, for
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example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for
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the in-house sysapes was said to be two bananas and three grapes
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(another source claimed it was three bananas and one grape, but observed
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however, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO ).
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At a complication level any higher than that, one asked the
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manufacturers to send someone around to check things. See also
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Infinite-Monkey Theorem.
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