On: Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall...

[dllthomas]

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."

[glouwbug → dllthomas]

Plebs would often go down to the water line and hold their ears up to Unix shells to see if they could hear the C

[layer8 → dllthomas]

Interestingly, at some point “N” began being used for zero, though apparently only some centuries after the fall: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero