Talk:Zawinski's law of software envelopment

I do not know whether I was the first person to come up with the joke about all programs expanding to read mail. I can confirm that I thought of it independently when I was a student at Harvard. (So it must have been some time between 1983 and 1987.) At the time I had Emacs and readnews in mind. The only reason that I picked MIT is that it was easy to suppose, at least for a joke, that geeky Internet software was typically developed at MIT. (It was especially easy to suppose at Harvard!)

Greg Kuperberg 01:45, 8 March 2006 (UTC)


 * (I moved the following from the article. — LazyEditor (talk))
 * I'm pretty sure I heard Jamie utter this phrase before 1989. I worked with him from 1986 until sometime in early to mid 1989 after which point I had very little contact with him. 65.121.28.16 25 August 2006

Slashdotted! Prepare for vandalism. :)
 * slashdotters dont vandalize hahaha yeah right

Is Google a useful example?
A past edit by 87.196.60.115 removed Google from the list of examples (Mozilla, Emacs), with the comment google is not a program. I actually think Google is a useful example. I admit that it isn't a program in the traditional (Web 1.0?) sense, but the two products GMail and Google Desktop both both do mail. With the changing meaning of 'program', I wonder what other wikipedian's views are on this? I also appeal to the name of the law referring to 'software' giving it a very general flavour. DLeonard 05:24, 28 May 2006 (UTC)


 * "...referring to 'software'..." I hear that the next Gorillaz CD will include an email client in its extras.... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 202.27.216.35 (talk) 10:30, 3 May 2007 (UTC).

THIS REDIRECT GOES TO A PAGE THAT DOES NOT MENTION THE SUBJECT OF THE REDIRECT
So can someone who knows WTF this is about add the info to the target article... Stub Mandrel (talk) 09:03, 21 June 2016 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth, the target page used to have a subsection 'Zawinski's law of software envelopment' (see ) but it was removed a few days ago by . Anyway, there's a relevant AFD from 2011 at Articles for deletion/Zawinski's law of software envelopment that ended as "Merge". I gueass that's a (weak) argument to restore the removed content. – Tea2min (talk) 11:20, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
 * One cannot restore inadequately referenced content. Find proper references, and we are good. So far all I saw was undue promotion of an average software engineer. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:21, 21 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Restored. Staszek Lem (talk) 16:32, 21 June 2016 (UTC)