The religion of CHI was a tongue-in-cheek “religion” practiced in the mid-1970s by students of the Introduction to programming course at Case Western Reserve University. The course was taught in the programming language ALGOL, and assignments were coded on punch cards and processed on a UNIVAC 1108 computer running a custom operating system named CHI.
Students had a ritual where they would recite a phrase whenever the time was exactly 11:08. The phrase was, “It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN.” These were the first five commands found in the ALGOL manual. They were used for finding an absolute value, defining an alphabetic character, and finding the mathematical values for arcsin, arccosine, and arctangent.
Programming language, Programming terms
