[SIGCIS-Members] Is it a myth that David Letterman had a Top Ten List about the Pentium bug?

[Ellen Spertus]

Thank you, Paul!

As nice of a story as it would have been to have floating point
> humour in the late night show cannon,  it seems that this one
> isn't true.


Per my original email, there was a 1996 thesis referencing a 1994 internal
Intel document that Letterman did make a joke during his *monologue*, which
may have been:

You know what goes great with those defective Pentium chips?
Defective Pentium salsa!

Do any of you know someone with enough clout at Intel to find out what
their archivists say?

This may be an instance of the Mandela Effect
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Manifestations_and_types>.

Here's another story involving floating point: I used to spend time at the
University of Washington CSE Department and Microsoft. To drive from one to
the other, you would drive over the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. I
always referred to it as the "floating point" bridge, and nobody ever
raised an eyebrow. I see a nonironic reference to the Evergreen Floating
Point Bridge in a Los Angeles Times article about a traffic accident
<https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-22-mn-936-story.html>.

Ellen
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