From one of those forwards:
Slow but Happy
It's the 1970s, and this pilot fish writes the first online application for his company's mainframe. It's blazingly fast, but boss tells fish, "Put a loop in that does nothing 10,000 times before displaying the response screen." Why slow it down? fish asks. "Because as more applications go online, response time will get longer and longer, and the users will get more and more irritated," his boss tells him. "This way, we can just decrease the number of times the empty loop executes, keep response time constant and keep the users happy."
