Tim maintained a collection of '99 Bottles of Beer' programmed in 227 different programming languages. The idea has been initiated by a post to an humor mailing list, where somebody sent the full lyrics in early 1994. This was seen as a waste of bandwith, the job could have been accomplished with six lines of BASIC:
10 REM BASIC Version of 99 Bottles of beer
20 FOR X=100 TO 1 STEP -1
30 PRINT X;"Bottle(s) of beer on the wall,";X;"bottle(s) of beer"
40 PRINT "Take one down and pass it around,"
50 PRINT X-1;"bottle(s) of beer on the wall"
60 NEXT
The original poster made the mistake of slighting C++ programmers,
so Tim rose to the occasion with his version of '99 Bottles' in
C++. It opened the floodgates and programmers from all over the
world gave different versions in assorted languages.
Tim's list started with about 20 languages and exploded to 227 from there.
In 1998 I asked Tim for his permission to mirror his pages as part of my collection Best of Internet. Up to April 2002 I used his original pages and layout. Somewhere around middle 2001 Tim's pages disappeared from the web and he and his collection never came back. In April 2002 I decided to restart the site with a fresh design. Within four months I got 90 contributions with more silly or obscure, sometimes even useable implementations. In middle of June 2002 there were more than 315 languages...
Some more obscure contributions received by Tim are the Aleph-Null (for the non mathematically inclined, you might replace Alpeh-Null with infinity):
Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-Null bottles of beer
You take one down & pass it around
Aleph-Null bottles of beer
or even the Zen-beer:
No bottles of beer on the wall,
No bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
No bottles of beer.
As the site is really online, I am pleased for any contributions of missing versions and forgotten programming languages. Just send me an email with your version and please put your name and your Homepage as comment on the header. As everything here is scripted, your version will soon be included (please expect 1-2 weeks).
Some people I would like to thank for their support:
- Philipp Winterberg - he submitted 99 additional examples, which are available at his Project-Page. Additionally he has programmed a Windows screensaver and wrote an article about this project.
- Thomas-Martin Kruel - he spent bandwidth and server-colocation for the last three years.
Oliver