The Biggest Cults In Tech

bobby f. writes "Infoworld has published its list of the biggest cults in tech — including Palmists, Newtonians, Commodorians, the Brotherhood of the Ruby, IBM power systems fanboys, Ubuntu-ists, and Lispers. A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member)." Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right. Fire away.

Comments

Cult #1

[alain94040]

It's been a very long time since I met a Newton or Palm cult member! Time to update the list.

Allow me to change the definition of "cult" slightly to "whatever belief your smart friends want you to give up". Then cult #1 is:

Name: Windows
Established: 1995
Gathering of the Tribe: InfoWorld and other magazines that pretend that everything except Windows is a "cult"
Major Deity: Bill Gates
Sacred Relic: 30-letter authorization keys
The Antichrist: Linus Torvalds

Re:Cult #1

[areusche]

Oh I can do this:

Name: Mac OS

Established: 1984

Gathering of the tribe: Apple WWDC

Major Deity: Steve Jobs, Woz

Sacred Relic: A half eaten apple.

Believed Antichrist: IBM

True Antichrist: Bill Gates.

Re:Cult #1

[RiotingPacifist]

why would the cult of apple curse IBM!? did IBM not cometh and deliverith the sacred PC of power?

Name: cult of free software
Established: 1985
Major Deity: RMS
Sacred document: GPL
Antichrist: !GPL'd software

and

Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu

Re:Cult #1

[Chris Acheson]

Windows isn't a cult.

It's a religion.

Re:Cult #1

[Anonymous Coward]

did IBM not cometh and deliverith the sacred PC of power?

You're forgetting the next verse of the Book of Jobs...

And thus did the people of Apple rejoice for their Chips of Power were great and mighty, and Altivec did cause their enemies to quake in fear. But lo! There were cries from within the camp of Apple, for the faithful had placed the Chips of Power upon their lap and they were terribly burned. The people cast down their Chips of Power and took up the Chips of Core which merely singed their pants, and so the fallen IBM was cast out from the camp of Apple.

Re:Cult #1

[bigngamer92]

The only difference between a cult and religion is one has political power. And that's why Apple is also a religion as it has commercials.

Re:Cult #1

[gmhowell]

why would the cult of apple curse IBM!?

If you bled six colors, you wouldn't have to ask.

Re:Cult #1

[SpitfireSMS]

Windows isn't a cult.

It's a religion.

Exactly, just like scientology

Re:Cult #1

[BluBrick]

Religion: A large popular cult
Cult: A small unpopular religion

Re:Cult #1

[Shark]

The oldest appointment I have dates back to Sept 2001.

Bet it wasn't a girl...

Re:Cult #1

[commodore64_love]

Name: Commodore Amiga OS
Established: 1985
Gathering of the tribe: various E.U. discoteks
Major Deity: Jay Butterfield
Sacred Relic: a red-and-white "boing" ball.
Believed Antichrist: Commodore management
True Antichrist: Wintel empire
Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once, Instant off shutdown (flip the power switch), rapid bootup (10 seconds), balancing Chip RAM versus Fast RAM, and Guru Meditation errors

Re:Cult #1

[mark-t]

The primary difference between a cult and a religion is that in a religion, all of the information about it is openly and freely exchanged to the maximum extent that anyone who believes in the religion is capable. A cult, however, keeps some aspects of their beliefs and practices to themselves, revealing certain details only to trusted associates that are also within the cult.

Re:Cult #1

[adavies42]

schizophrenia: a one-man unpopular religion.

Re:Cult #1

[Anonymous Coward]

The oldest appointment I have dates back to Sept 2001.

Homeland security would like to have a word with you Mr.Dave.

Re:Cult #1

[keeboo]

Name: Commodore Amiga OS

You mean Commodore Amiga as whole.
During the second half of 1990s, after the original chipset started to show its age, a faction appeared insisting that the true value was the OS itself.
The OS was great (the kernel, datatypes, installable filesystems, the modularized structure etc), but I think what made the machine mythical was the whole stuff. It was an overload of perfection.

Major Deity: Jay Butterfield

I guess you mean Jay Miner.

Believed Antichrist: Commodore management True Antichrist: Wintel empire

I think it was the opposite. Amigans loathed x86 and DOS/Windows (it was indeed crap), but what really killed the platform was those Commodore management dumbasses.
It's a long history but basically they wasted lots of money in bad or plain stupid products (PC clones, x86-compatibility boards, A600...) and let the platform development stagnate (the stillborn AAA chipset, the switch from 68k processors to PA-RISC the engineers were considering etc).

Major religious rituals: Multitasking 100 programs at once,(...)

I personally liked to emulate a 68k Mac (actually it was more like a virtualization), then inside that emulate a x86, then inside that a DOS ZX-Spectrum emulator playing a game.
In parallel, a number of programs (like www browser, IRC client etc), as usual.

Sounds like no big deal nowadays, but back then it was different.
Mac OS was a joke (it lacked preemptive multitasking for years, programs used static memory alocation, it crashed if you coughed nearby etc), no comments on Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was not immediately viable. OS/2 worked well, but it was heavy and lacked apps (then it died).

Re:Cult #1

[dido]

I wonder how this got modded up, as it's demonstrably false. There are no secret books of the Bible, or secret doctrines relating to the Catholic faith. There are, however, many writings throughout the centuries that the Catholic Church has deemed heretical and censored. Big difference between the two. Anyone caught practicing or even reading of those heretical beliefs that were censored in the Church's heyday would have been burned at the stake or worse. Everything, however, relating to orthodox Catholic doctrine has always been openly and freely exchanged to anyone who wanted to practice the religion at least ever since the Roman persecutions ended in 311 AD. There is nothing of the hierarchical initiations you see in Freemasonry or Scientology for instance, where secret mysteries are revealed as you ascend.

Re:Cult #1

[vlm]

Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu

Bzzzt fail.

I was "around" back then (although I didn't join until a couple years later) and the 1.0 disks were an epic fail. Not a sacred relic at all. If anything, the opposite of a sacred relic...

Check out:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html

Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently InfoMagic, a CD vendor, shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.

Also if anything would be Debian's "antichrist" it would be Debian's own non-free repository of software with licenses too icky to be in the real "main" Debian. The fact that I like the devilish non-free repository probably means I listened to too much heavy metal in the 80s.

Re:Cult #1

[mdwh2]

I like my modern computers, and I run Windows on them, so I guess you could say I like Windows. Plenty of people do - just because we don't get fanatically about it doesn't mean we don't like it.

For a while, I viewed Windows as very much a "least worst", but that just means the other offerings are even worse. But since 2000, I have to say it's a decent OS (based on the robust NT line, but capable of running consumer applications). Computing in the late 90s was terrible, as all the choices were dire, but I have to say that now, computing is fun again. There are still a few things that annoy me about Windows, and it's a shame that there isn't a mainstream descendant of a decent platform like AmigaOS, but the other mainstream alternatives annoy me far more than Windows.

So yes, I'll say it, I like Windows. And I've tried plenty of operating systems in my time. I used to hate it, but ironically the poor offerings from the alternatives that survived, and the vast improvement over the NT line of DOS/9x, mean that things are different now.

Re:Cult #1

[mark-t]

You appear to presume that it was practiced in latin because it was desired to keep it secret. If this were the case, it would likely have been practiced in a language of the church's own invention rather than one that was, at the time the r/c church appears to have originated, a still living language. Indeed, its use was maintained for as long as it was not because of any particular desire for secrecy, but because they placed importance on the precise manner in which they traditionally practiced their rituals since the time that they started. I won't deny that it created quite distinct feelings of distancing people from the contents of the roman catholic faith, however. But, this can easily be seen as a side effect of their values, rather than deliberate intent except insomuch as one wants to read deliberate intent into their reluctance to change how they practiced their rituals, which I had already said, they had placed a high level of importance on.

Fun Read?

[Anonymous Coward]

A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member).

I belong to the Cult of Single Page Views, not 8-page clickfests.

Not so much fun, actually.

Re:Fun Read?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I belong to the cult of "why the fuck you can not see the "print" link, you ass?" cult.

http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433

Re:Fun Read?

[LaskoVortex]

Ah, the cult of grammar Nazi's.

Name: Grammar Nazi Cult
Established: 1383
Gathering of the Tribe: Internet Comment Forums
Major Diety: Geoffrey Chaucer
Sacred Relic: Strunk and White
The Antichrist: The Apostrophe Between "t" and "s" in the Word "it's" When "it's" is used as a posessive
Purpose: Annoy Everyone not in the Cult

Re:Fun Read?

[stuktongue]

Thats "possessive." :-)

Re:Fun Read?

[earlymon]

Kindly have the decency to identify us correctly by our Sacred Relic - Strunk and White's Elements of Style, First Edition.

I hope you did not mean for us to lump us in the Later Editioners - who eat off of their bellies, when there are perfectly good tables about for use of that function.

In any case, your abbreviation of the Holy Name of our Sacred Relic may well have been alleviated by the acceptable, yet colloquial (although arcane), use of et cetera, hereby illustrated as per Rule 2, as you are but no doubt aware of so to do: Stunk and White, etc.

(And yes, I thank you in advance for the opportunity of scoring points with my peers to compact my typography by ending a sentence with the abbreviated form of et cetera, thereby saving a full period. My deep appreciation is also given for the bonus points scored as well that the word period preceded it's synonymously named punctuation mark in the previous sentence. It is for this alone that I defer to kindness and not rag upon the lack of calendar year reference, similarly missing.

After all, a good Grammar Nazi is never a quibbling Sematics Nazi, nor worse, a Syntax Nazi (this last reference having been given, quite naturally, with highest reverence to the ghosts of alt.syntax).) *

Kindly remember, and please never forget: if something can be said with few words, it's worth saying very well; therefore, it worth saying with a great many words, in order to be at one's best, if for no other reason. (N.B., it is well and good that initiates question the validity of verbosity over being succinct, as an object lesson that the admonishment for clarity overrides.)

In closing, I am further compelled to compliment you upon the quite deft class-naming used for our gathering place, indicating, as it does, this modern forum while simultaneously not excluding Usenet, that is, as goes without saying, our one true Kobol, with the codex modification as it applies, naturally, to the mythology presented only in the contempory BattleStar Gallactica.

* Note the parenthetical salvation of the egregious Usenet syntax error had the sentence been constructed to end thus: alt.syntax.

Re:Fun Read?

[earlymon]

You spelled semantics wrong.

For the sake of newcomers, it's important to note that Guild of Grammar Nazis and the Spelling Nazi Brotherhood have a bilateral-cooperation agreement, thereby ensuring work for both unions' members.

Cults in tech?

[fatboyslack]

Strange to have 'cults in tech' and no mention of gamers, console vs pc, mmorpgers in WoW etc.

If anything was a cult it would be WoW and Evercrack.

Re:Cults in tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always considered myself a Quaker.

Re:Cults in tech?

[mcfatboy93]

PC games and MMORPGS kick @$$ its not a cult its a way of life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111

Re:Cults in tech?

[Anonymous Coward]

PC games and MMORPGS kick @$$

I agree - Nethack FTW!

Oh, wait - you weren't referring to the player next to two piles of money, after all.

Never mind, then.

Re:Cults in tech?

[houstonbofh]

I've always considered myself a Quaker.

No DOOMsday cult?

Re:Cults in tech?

[kzieli]

Yes we could all add to this list. Lispers are correctly known as "Knights of the Lambda Calculus" Where are the Pythonistas and their sub groupings such as the followers of the flying pony. The Webites who hold that the browser is an operating system. The Vimpire Clans and the followers of the one true Emacs, or the XEmacs heresy. All these cults where missing from the list. And let us not forget the many many tribes of Trolls that inhabit the internet.

Re:Cults in tech?

[Gothic_Walrus]

No DOOMsday cult?

Of course not. That would just be Unreal.

Re:Cults in tech?

[denmarkw00t]

I'm with the Church of Latter Day Megaman.

Lispers AND Apple Users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did they list the same group twice?

Pretty absurd Apple is absent

[calmofthestorm]

especially if we're mentioning Ubuntu. Seems like windows is missing too.

A fanboi is a fanboi, even if their product actually is better.

Re:Pretty absurd Apple is absent

[maxume]

As yes, The Cult of Loose.

Their won cult that never should of ben allowed.

Re:Pretty absurd Apple is absent

[Kankraka]

And let's not forget The Cult of Those Who Need to Correct Failure, but Fail Hard Themselves.

In my head I transposed the 'n' for a 'l' in cults

[Anonymous Coward]

Strangely enough the article read much the same.

TFA In One Page

[BabyDuckHat]

http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433

slashdotters

[Anonymous Coward]

very big mistake - the author forgot to mention slashdotters

Perl?

[quickOnTheUptake]

What about Perl? Seems a lot more cultish (in a good way) to me than Ubuntu or RoR.

Re:Perl?

[jgtg32a]

I'm not so sure, from what I can tell Perl is just a really good community, they know their limitations.

Re:Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Name: Perl
Established: 1987
Gathering of the tribe: USENET
Major Deity: Larry Wall
Sacred Relic: All those O'rielly books
The Anti-Christ: Ruby

Re:Perl?

[TheGratefulNet]

ah yes, perl. one of those 'write-only' languages. much like c++ in that regard.

both perl and C++ are langs I dread to read others' code in.

Re:Perl?

[whoever57]

What about Perl?

The language with a "bless" command -- definitely one for cults!

Re:Perl?

[whoever57]

both perl and C++ are langs I dread to read others' code in.

Other's code? I have enough trouble reading my own code a couple of months after I wrote it.

Nah, Apple fans..

[WarwickRyan]

..are more like Scientologists than an cult....

Amiga

[PowerEdge]

In an earlier stage of life I worked at RadioShack, when they actually sold electronics and radio equipment. One of my co-workers was a ham radio enthusiast and would spend hours talking about the rise of the Amiga and how it would come back. It was always just a few months away from releasing a new OS or platform. I would wager if I went back to that store... Or perhaps the store that replaced it, since RadioShack is just a shell of its former self he would still extoll the virtues of Amiga and it's imminent resurgence. Then he'd mutter about how Gateway killed it because the technology was too advanced for the average PC user to accept.

Re:Amiga

[Allicorn]

Eric Schwartz's terrific little animated music video about Amiga accompanied by the "Still Alive" song from Portal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q

Forth

[Dr. Eggman]

We friars of Forth our outraged at your constant disre...Hey, I'm talking here. Hey, pay attention, I'm talking here! Hrmph, Forth gets no respect. No respect at all.

Re:Forth

[PCM2]

1 CONSTANT Funny
Funny Moderation +!

Re:Forth

[TheGratefulNet]

forth respect gets

(come on, its STACK oriented. sheesh. do the joke correctly)

Oracle DBAs

[jimjamjoh]

Anyone who's ever worked in an org w/ full-time Oracle DBAs can attest to how fanatical they are in allegiance to Oracle, even to the point of ruin.

And it's funny, too, because you think they're interested in databases, relational concepts, data integrity, and all of this in general, but they're not, they interested in Oracle products, period. They'd quit before they managed a SQL Server or PostgreSQL database for you.

Cultists.

Re:Oracle DBAs

[abigor]

You can always tell because they believe all of the business logic should be migrated from your current app framework to stored procedures, there to bitrot in PL/SQL hell forever.

Clueless

[burris]

Programming language Ruby and its younger, sleeker sibling, Ruby on Rails

I stopped reading after this.

C= 8-bitters instead of the Amiga?!

[Cajun Hell]

C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.

Re:C= 8-bitters instead of the Amiga?!

[Mike Buddha]

There are still people crowing about how Amiga is poised for a comeback. Everyone's going to realize how wrong they were for abandoning the platform. We'll all repent and be saved by the second coming of Amiga. They still go on and on about REXX and Video Toaster, as if those are relevant technologies.

I for one am actively working to prevent this disaster by promoting... Atari TOS! TOS can save us all! Don't listen to the Amiga infidels! You only need 512 colors! MIDI, MIDI, MIDI! Those Amiga Cultists are all nutters! 16/32-bit Atari is the true path!

Tech Cults?

[Shadow Wrought]

They mention the Commodore fans, but not the Amiga fans. Newton Fans, but not the Apple Fanbois. That'd be like listing the World's religions and failing to mention Catholicism and Mormons.

Ye Olde Apple Cult

[russotto]

Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox
Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora
Major Deity: Steve Wozniak
Antichrist: Steve Jobs
Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II
Mantra: Apple II Forever

Why Windows isn't a cult

[Cajun Hell]

"Quantity has a quality all its own." -- Joseph Stalin

Size matters. Within the topic of mysticism, when you get to the mainstream stuff like Christianity/Judaism/Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they're not cults, regardless of any of the beliefs within them. Likewise, neither is Windows, for the same exact reason. You have to be a persecuted minority to be a cult. Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant.

Apple is approaching loss of its culty flavor as well. Sure, they're still minority, but they're a big rich one, and certainly not persecuted (except maybe the gamers).

Re:Why Windows isn't a cult

[calmofthestorm]

Not all X users are X fanbois. I have a ubuntu using friend who hates it. He switched away from windows awhile back. Why does he stick with ubuntu? It sucks less, in his estimation. And it makes more intuitive sense (He's a chemist without much computer knowledge, but still technically-minded.)

I love linux and think it will solve all the world's problems from swine flu to windows vista. I am a fanboi.

But very few windows users are fanbois. Only a few actually like windows. OS X, nearly all its users seem to be drooling fanbois, but as you say this seems to be changing, and this may just be the set I know.

Linux is somewhere in between I find, but I'm at a tech school, and around here linux outnumbers windows anyway with os x being a clear leader.

Cool, I am a member of 4 of the "cults"

[MarkWatson]

1. Early Newton owner
2. long time Lisp developer (and I wrote 2 Spring-Verlag Lisp books, back in ancient history)
3. right now, Ruby is my favorite language
4. I am typing this on Ubuntu (installed on my MacBook) :-)

They missed out C programmers

[BikeHelmet]

Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language, and results in a program filled with memory leaks.

C is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of C programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a low level language!

I've seen more horribly malformed C than VB!

Re:They missed out C programmers

[ceifeira]

def fib(n):
    if n == 0 or n == 1:
        return n
    else:
        return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

for i in range(36):
    print "n=%d => %d" % (i, fib(i))

real    0m20.272s
user    0m20.225s
sys    0m0.024s

#include <stdio.h>

int fib (int n)
{
  if (n == 1 || n == 0) return n;
  else return (fib (n - 1) + fib (n - 2));
}

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  register int i = 0;
  for (i; i < 35; i++)
    {
      printf("n=%i %i\n", i, fib(i));
    }
}

real    0m0.476s
user    0m0.472s
sys    0m0.004s

Re:They missed out C programmers

[frank_adrian314159]

Yeah, but try running fib(100) and your answers are still wrong. Lisp gets the right answer. And does it quickly because you can compile it, too.

BeOS left off?

[Jeremi]

I am a high priest in the cult of BeOS, and I am frankly incensed that fine operating system was not included in the list.

I strongly suspect that Microsoft strong-armed the authors of the article to keep BeOS off the list, in order to maintain their monopoly.

Thank you.

Re:BeOS left off?

[Fallingcow]

Oh, BeOS. Wow. I don't get clingy and fanboy-ish over many tech things, but that's one of them. If it had modern drivers and could run at least most of my software, I'd use BeOS over anything else--Linux, Windows, OSX, *BSD, you name it.

Hell, I've even begun to need some future-proof, extensive, filesystem-level metadata for my ever-growing collections of various things; if only BeOS were still alive & kicking with a bright future, I could just use BFS. Wish the other operating systems would catch up with where BeOS was years ago. For that matter, I wish they'd act as responsive on a 2GHz dual-core system as BeOS did on a Pentium 166Mhz...

Missed the biggest of all

[Brett Buck]

Object-oriented programming. And yes, I expected to get done for heresy.

        Brett

Wot, no NetWare?

[marquis111]

Established: 1983
Gathering of the tribes: Brainshare
Major deity: Ray Noorda
Minor deities: Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell, Mark Hurst
The Antichrist: Bill Gates
Tool of the downfall: TCP/IP? What's that?
Holy Relics: IPX/SPX
Most arcane incantation: dsrepair

Just saying, it should have been on the list at least.

author is a rookie - didn't list OS/2 cult

[Locutus]

No OS/2 shows an obvious lack of knowing the history of computer software and operating systems.

LoB

Re:Linux

[rts008]

That's GNU/Linux, you freedom-hating blasphemer!

Gather the HURD!! *draws katana*

signed,
RMS

Best Cult

[maz2331]

The cult of Pragmatism:

Name: Pragmatics
Established: Time Immemorial
Gathering of the Tribe: Anyplace shit has to work.
Major Deity: It Works
Sacred Relic: It Works
The Antichrist: Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work.

Re:Best Cult

[Late Adopter]

Man, you guys must fucking hate Sony =)

AmigaOS

[DingerX]

Standing in awe at the historical wonder that is the Amiga, OS and hardware, is a natural human reaction, and therefore not the sign of belonging to any cult. The emotions that I've felt considering the Amiga are not unlike those I've experienced standing at the foot of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, or what I'd imagine would be the sensation of laying one's mortal eyes on the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Actually, come to think of it, the Amiga was more Golden Pavilion than Baalbek: harmonious; perfect even in its flaws. So perfect, it should not exist on this flawed earth. A crazed monk burned the Temple of the Golden Pavilion -- that's cultism. There are folks who believe the AmigaOS will rise again to rule us all -- that's cultism. But admiring the sheer perfection of the Amiga as a computer system of its generation, and marveling at its unparalleled run as the most elegant and best-performing PC on the market? That's just appreciating historical reality.