Useless Machines: The Joke Tools That Are Secretly the Point

A Program With No Reason to Exist

Every tool so far in this little series has had a justification. It is the best at something. It saves you on a bad day. It does one narrow job perfectly. This episode is about software that has no justification at all, and is beloved anyway, and what that says about the people who make all the rest of it.

Start with the purest example. There is a command called sl. It exists because of a typo. The two most-typed letters in a Unix user's life are l and s, the command that lists your files, and sooner or later every single person types them in the wrong order. They type sl. Nothing should happen. But a Japanese developer named Toyoda Masashi decided that something should happen. If you type sl, a full steam locomotive, drawn in text, comes chugging across your entire terminal, smoke and wheels and carriages, and you cannot do anything else until the train has finished its journey. It does not correct your mistake. It does not help you. It gently, mechanically punishes you, and it has been doing so for decades.

The Cow That Started It All

If the genre of absurd Unix tools has a founding monument, it is cowsay. Written in the late nineteen nineties by a programmer named Tony Monroe, cowsay does this. You give it a sentence. It prints that sentence inside a comic-strip speech bubble, and below the bubble, drawn in plain text characters, is a cow, looking at you, having apparently said it.

That is the program. There is a companion called cowthink, where the cow merely thinks the sentence, the bubble drawn as thought instead of speech. Over the years people contributed a whole menagerie of other creatures to replace the cow, a small zoo of text animals waiting in the wings. cowsay has become so culturally embedded that it shows up wired into serious software as an optional flourish, system tools that will, if you ask nicely, deliver their real and important output through the mouth of a cow.

The Movie Effect, Faithfully Recreated

In the nineteen ninety-two film Sneakers, there is a scene with a screen full of scrambled, encrypted characters that slowly, character by character, resolve themselves into readable text. It is maybe forty seconds of cinema. It has lived in the head of everyone who saw it.

In twenty seventeen, a developer named Brian Barto sat down and recreated that exact effect as a command line tool called no-more-secrets. You pipe any text into it, the listing of a folder, the contents of a file, anything, and it first displays it as that same Hollywood gibberish, then runs the decryption sweep, and your ordinary boring text assembles itself on screen with all the gravity of a spy thriller. He even included a second program, called sneakers, that reproduces the specific scene from the movie. It is a perfect, useless act of devotion. Forty seconds of film someone loved so much they rebuilt it in C so the rest of us could pipe our grocery lists through it.

Ornament for Its Own Sake

A few more, quickly, because the genre is deep. There is lolcat, whose entire function is to take any text you pass through it and pour it out in shifting rainbow colors. It adds no information. It is pure ornament, and people thread it through their tools constantly, just to make a dull moment briefly pretty.

There is figlet, which turns a short piece of text into enormous letters built out of smaller characters, the banner style you have seen at the top of a thousand projects. Its name is a small monument to its three creators. It stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn's letters, and it has been making text unnecessarily large since nineteen ninety-one.

There is cmatrix, which fills your screen with the falling green code from The Matrix, cascading endlessly, doing absolutely nothing. It was written by Chris Allegretta, who is also the author of nano, the plain, friendly text editor that has genuinely helped millions of beginners. The same person made the deeply useful thing and the deeply useless thing, and saw no contradiction, because there is none.

And there is asciiquarium, which turns your terminal into a little aquarium, text fish swimming back and forth across your screen, a castle, the occasional shark, a calm pointless little world living in the corner of your workday.

Why the Useless Tools Matter

So why spend an episode on software that does nothing? Because these tools are not actually a sideshow. They are evidence.

A steam train for your typo, a cow that delivers your output, a movie effect rebuilt out of pure love, fish swimming in your terminal. These exist because the people who build software are people, and the culture they built has room in it for play. And that exact same culture, the one relaxed enough to spend a weekend on a train animation, is the one that produced SQLite, and curl, and every quiet, load-bearing tool the earlier episodes were about. It is not two cultures. It is one. The seriousness and the silliness grow from the same root, the same instinct that says, I can just make a thing, and put it into the world, and maybe it helps and maybe it only delights, and both of those are allowed.

The useless machines are the proof that the medium stayed humane. A world of software that had no sl, no cowsay, no asciiquarium, would be a world where every line of code had to justify itself to a manager, and that is a colder world, and the tools that came out of it would be colder too.

So the next time a train chugs across your terminal because you fumbled two letters, do not be annoyed. It is a tiny handshake across time from someone who thought your small mistake deserved a small joke. That is the whole internet, really, working exactly as intended.