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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/arkaycee on 2025-05-30 13:55:10+00:00.
Back in the mid-1980s, I worked for a company that made manufacturing equipment that ran on an internal network. I had to learn it to support it. They had recently re-written the interface from the ground up, but the documentation was the earlier version, so I was kinda lost. I turned out to be proficient at writing documentation so I volunteered to rewrite the doc as I was learning the system. In doing so I discovered a strange appendix to the doc that got me incredulous, and then got me cracking up. But first, a bit of background...
There was a rule that had been handed down a couple of years before, that any document that a customer might ever see, even a highly technical document, had to be read and approved by the Marketing department.
A co-worker wanted to test this, so they wrote this appendix, that was purporting to describe the networking protocol involved in the system. It was approved with no changes by Marketing.
What did it describe? A protocol called the "TP Protocol." Rather than being a 7-layer network, it could be implemented as a 2- or 3-layer network, each layer called a "ply." So 2-ply or 3-ply. The messages were identical sized, and the end-of-message was called a perf. There was a potential issue to be fixed later, that a CANcel character could cause it to pause until manually cleared, this was called "sitting on the CAN." It went on from there similarly for several pages. I wish I could remember more (I saved a copy but I can't find it. *sigh*).
I left the appendix in with my version-2 manual after checking with my manager and him forwarding my doc to Marketing.