A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers
named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was doubtless influenced
by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There
do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in
hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for
unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples
include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under
indent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor
has heard from more than sixty others by email, and the organization
line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly
from more than one site. See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at
http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.
