Dan Q

Day: 14 February 2025

Piano Repair

The sustain pedal broke on our upright piano.

Normally the insides of the piano are a terrifying place that only our tuner gets to look at. A scary realm whose mysteries I cannot begin to comprehend.

But I was feeling very brave, so I popped it open, found this troublesome hinge, and bodged a fix. It sounds great.

I feel accomplished.

Behind the lower front board of an open upright piano, a hand reaches in between the pedal rods and the soundboard to point at the hinge screw of the sustain pedal.

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INSULTS.COM

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had a collection of 5¼” and later 3½” floppy disks1 on which were stored a variety of games and utilities that I’d collected over the years2.

5¼" floppy disk, 3M branded, labelled "ABM, BACKGAMM, BLKJACK, BUGS, CMINOR, HANGMAN -> TYPE DOCUMENT FIRST, INSULTS, PORKEY". A Post-It note on the sleeve reads "INSULTS" and has pictures of the "Esc" and "Num Lock" keys.
I had lots of floppy disks that looked almost-exactly like this: a scrawled label of their contents and notes on how to make use of them that would perhaps only make sense to me.

I remember that at some point I acquired a program called INSULTS.COM. When executed, this tool would spoof a basic terminal prompt and then, when the user pressed any key, output a randomly-generated assortment of crude insults.

Do you feel thoroughly insulted yet?

As far as prank programs go, it was far from sophisticated. I strongly suspect that the software, which was released for free in 1983, was intended to be primarily a vehicle to promote sales of a more-complex set of tools called PRANKS, which was advertised within.

In any case: as a pre-pubescent programmer I remember being very interested in the mechanism by which INSULTS.COM was generating its output.

Illustration showing construction of an insult: "You" + an adjective + a container + "of" + a different adjective + a noun.
I partially-reverse-engineered the permutations by polling the output and looking for parts I hadn’t seen before, and tallying them up. Mostly in an effort to validate the program’s claim that it’s capable of generating “more than 22 million insults”3.

Of course, nowadays I understand reverse-engineering better than I did as a child. So I downloaded a copy of INSULTS.COM from this Internet Archive image, ran it through Strings, and pulled out the data. Easy!

Wait for it, and you can be be insulted all over again!

Then I injected the strings into Perchance to produce a semi-faithful version of the application that you can enjoy today.

Why did I do this? Why do I do anything? Reimplementing a 42-year-old piece of DOS software that nobody remembers is even stranger than that time I reimplemented a 16-year old Flash advertisement! But I hope it gave you a moment’s joy to be told that you’re… an annoying load of festering parrot droppings, or whatever.

Footnotes

1 Also some 3″ floppy disks – a weird and rare format – but that’s another story.

2 My family’s Amstrad PC1512 had two 5¼” disk drives, which made disk-to-disk copying much easier than it was on computers with a single disk drive, on which you’d have to copy as much data as possible to RAM, swap disks to write what had been copied so far, swap disks back again, and repeat. This made it less-laborious for me to clone media than it was for most other folks I knew.

3 Assuming the random number generator is capable of generating a sufficient diversity of seed values, the claim is correct: by my calculation, INSULTS.COM can generate 22,491,833 permutations of insults.

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