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"Turbo Encabulator" the Original

Dave Rondot4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2026
YouTube
comedy · general · evergreen · 2016–2026 on HN

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

Used as the canonical reference for the jargon-parody trope, and as a joke whenever technobabble appears.

12 comments from Hacker News

@Joel_Mckay2025-11 · in “Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)”

"Still it's amusing how Whitney's style seems to personally offend people" So it was for the lols after all... Notably, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp is a common assignment for second year CS students. In a production setting, there is little reason to misappropriate resources for such toys. Bud Haggert still teaches smart people something very important about communication with interdisciplinary crowds: ▶ this video Doug Zongker's presentation similarly instructs people how to make better presentations to peers by demonstrating what not to do: link Best of luck =3

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@causality02023-11 · in “Rockwell Retro Encabulator [video]”

I don't know why people are always posting the Rockwell version when the older Turbo Emcabulator video is far superior. ▶ this video

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@NelsonMinar2021-07 · in “New mystery AWS product ‘Infinidash’ goes viral despite being entirely fictional”

There's a proud tradition of this kind of parody: the Turboencabluator is one of the most famous in engineering, a joke that goes back to 1944. link Bud Haggart's industrial training videos for the Turboencabulator from the 70s/80s are things of beauty. See ▶ this video

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@Anarch157a2019-05 · in “Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements (1908)”

I think you're gonna like this one [1]. The B-25 Mitchell instructional that was linked here some few weeks ago is also amazing [2]. [1]: ▶ this video [2]: link

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@bizzletk2026-06 · in “Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year”

Wouldn't the real story be to get government contracts? Those are more immune to public fickleness and market competition and usually have truly ludicrous margins. If they're the only ones who ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶u̶t̶o̶n̶o̶m̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶k̶i̶l̶l̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ can draw a reciprocation dingle-arm to reduce soinosoidal repleneration, then "I'm sure the government will buy it" [0] [0] ▶ this video