UFOs, Model Trains, and Code's 'Sacred Syllable'

Every programmer knows foo. It's the placeholder name, the stand-in variable, the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it actually come from?

In this episode, we trace the history of foo and bar in programming back through three unlikely chapters: a Depression-era comic strip, a WWII air squadron, and a group of MIT students who built a computer underneath a model train set. It's a story that runs through hacker culture, computing folklore, and one very strange corner of World War II history. Along the way, we find out what any of it has to do with bar.

In this episode:

• Bill Holman and Smokey Stover - a 1930s comic strip and the catchphrase that accidentally entered the computing lexicon
• The Foo Fighters - not the band; the original phenomenon, and the airmen who named it
• The Tech Model Railroad Club - MIT's legendary hacker origin story, and why their emergency switch matters more than you'd think

Episode music: 

• "Procrastination Rag (1927)" by George L. Cobb,  Public Domain
• "The Illusion of Cold" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0
• "Man Alone Chimes the Hour" by James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0

Transcript

0:22

In 1935, you are in Chicago. You are looking over the shoulder of a man named Bill Holman. Bill is a cartoon cartoonist. He has been drawing since he was a kid in Indiana, and now, finally, he has his own strip in the Sunday Funnies. He draws a firefighter, but not a hero. This firefighter wears his helmet backwards. He has lost the chin strap, so he has tied the helmet to his nose with a piece of string. He doesn't drive a truck. He drives a thing called a foo-mobile, It's a two-wheeled red car that balances on a single axle, defying gravity. Bill draws the world around this firefighter. And in the 1930s, that world has some casual, jagged racism thrown in. But mostly the world is just plain odd. The logic is gone. A man's ears fly off when he gets surprised. His wife's dress is covered with the words, hee haw, in tiny letters. On the wall of their living room, a sign reads, scram gravy ain't wavy. It is It is nonsense. It is screwball. It is exactly what a country deep in a depression needs to see. And Bill Holman needs a word to fill the little silences. A word for the license plates. A word for the background signs. A word to sit on the lips of the passersby. And he remembers a jade figurine he saw once in Chinatown in San Francisco. It was a statue of a wise man on the bottom was a word for luck for happiness foo so Bill writes it down but he spells it his own way F O O foo and the firefighter Smokey Stover says his catchphrase where there's foo there's fire I'm Daina this is Lore in the Machine and And this is the story of Foo Bar. If you write code for a living, you know foobar. When you are writing a tutorial and you need a name for a file that doesn't exist, you call it foo. And when you need a second file, you call it bar. It is a word that means insert name here. It's a word that means nothing. But before it meant nothing, it meant something very specific. It was a word for luck. It was a joke and a compliment. strip. And sometimes it was just the only word you could think of when the world stopped making sense. It is November 1944. You are Donald J. Meiers. You are a radar operator for the U.S. 415th Night Fighter Squadron. You are flying over the Rhine Valley in total darkness. Your job is to stare at a glowing screen to find the enemy. But tonight you see something else. Red balls of fire. Traces on the radar that shouldn't be there. They follow your wingtips. They dance. They vanish. You are tired and you are scared and you need a name for the ghosts on your screen. You grew up reading the Sunday funnies. You remember the firefighter with the helmet on backwards. You remember the word for things that don't make sense. So you call them foo fighters and the name sticks. It moves through the barracks. It moves through the Allied forces. It gets painted on the nose of bombers. And then the war ends. The lights go away, but the word doesn't. It is 1959. You're in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You're walking down a long, drafty corridor in Building 20 at MIT. the Plywood Palace. It was supposed to be a temporary building for the war effort, a place to design radar, but the war is over and the radar is gone. Now room 20E214 belongs to the boys and the model trains. This is the home of the Tech Model Railroad Club. These aren't kids playing with toys. These are people who want to know how the toys work and There are members who paint the trees and the little stations. And then there is the signals and power subcommittee. They don't care very much about the scenery. They care about the system. A massive, sprawling beast of telephone relays and switches that runs underneath the tracks. It is a computer before most people knew what a computer was. In this club, there's a student named Peter Sampson, and he is compiling dictionary because these boys in the plywood palace they have their own language they made words for things they have their own word for garage they call it a cruff. And they made up a word for a clever prank and they call it a hack. And they need a word for the emergency switch, the scram switch, the button you hit when the trains are about to collide.When you hit that button the digital clock, that they call a digital crock., on the wall stops the numbers disappear and the red letters flash a word. Now these boys grew up in the 30s and 40s they read Bill Holman they know about the firefighter they know about the strange lights in the sky that didn't make any sense. So when the system crashes, when things go wrong The clock doesn't say error. It says foo. Peter Sampson puts it in his dictionary. He writes foo, the sacred syllable. Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning. It's a joke. Or maybe it's a joke. It's a mix of a comic strip and a prayer. But the boys in the plywood palace grow up. They leave the model trains. move to the Artificial Intelligence Lab. They go to Digital Equipment Corporation. They become computer science pioneers. They help build the internet. And they take the word with them. They need a name for a temporary file. A variable that doesn't mean anything. A placeholder. So they type Foo. And they need a second one. And they remember the Foo Fighters. And they remember the war. And they remember the military acronym for things that are broken beyond repair. F-U-B-A-R. F'd up beyond all recognition. F-U. Fu. And they could spell it their way. They could break Foo Bar in half. Foo and Bar. F-O-O-B-A-R. Foo Bar was born. Today, you might be sitting in a cubicle or at a coffee shop. You're looking at a cursor blinking on a screen. You need to test a function. You need a file name. Without thinking, you type F-O-O, foo. You think you're typing nonsense, but you aren't. You are typing a word for good luck found on a Chinese statue. You're quoting a firefighter driving a two-wheeled car 1935. You're whispering the name of a ghost light over the Rhine Valley and you're flipping a switch in a plywood building in Cambridge trying to keep the trains from crashing. I'm Daina Bouquin and this is Lore in the Machine.