BSD Fortune - About this site

At a very young age I became fascinated with quotes from famous (and not so famous people). At the library I always looked for collections of quotes. Later on I also started buying books like the "Penguin Dictionary of Modern humorous Quotations", "The Forbes book of Business Quotations" and "You can say that again".

In the early 1990's I started working with Unix computer systems and was overjoyed to find out there was a program called "fortune" on these systems that generated random quotes. Very soon I had my Unix accounts (and later linux accounts) set up to generate a fortune each time I logged in. I also set up my e-mail to include a random quote in my signature. Soon some of my friends requested a daily e-mail with a quote of the day and the "Cookie Monster" was born. The "Cookie Monster" is a cronjob (Unix speak for a scheduled job) that sends out a daily e-mail with a random quote.

When twitter came along I soon set up a twitter account called bsdfortune that got automatic tweets from another cronjob. Twitter however limits you to only 140 characters in a tweet. Because many of the fortunes generated by the fortune program are much longer this site was born.

Acknowledgements

• Henrik Aasted Sørensen - Creator of the php code used to generate the random quotes on this site. See http://www.aasted.org
• All the collectors of quotes who published their fortune files on the world wide web. Use google to find them, there are far too many to link to here.