Fortune cookies

Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.

Click here for a new fortune (Stanford AI Project).
Click here for a new fortune (MWC).


Hackers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project in the late 1960s and 1970s loved Chinese food, and the Bay Area had great Chinese food: Louis Kao's Hsi Nan at Town & Country Village (later in Menlo Park and Redwood City), Chef Chu's on El Camino, and Kapok in Oakland were among our favorites. After dinner, we stuck the fortunes from our fortune cookies into our shirt pockets and headed back to the AI Lab, where most useful work was done very late at night. Then we typed the gathered fortunes into a fortune file, so we could receive a random fortune each time we logged in.

One time I reached into my pocket and pulled out "This garment inspected by #17", so I just typed it in; it became a local favorite. (Thirty-five years later, I realize this anecdote is probably incomprehensible to younger generations; I haven't bought a shirt with an inspection slip in the pocket in decades.)

I continued the fortune file tradition when I worked at Mark Williams Company starting in 1977. The fortune files for this page are a lightly edited version of the Stanford AI Project fortune file from saildart.org (ca. 1975, misspellings corrected, dups eliminated) and the COHERENT fortune file /usr/games/lib/fortunes from 4/18/1991.