In the beginning, all was void, with the spirit of God
brooding over the dark vapors.
Then God said, "Let there be Byte," and there was Byte.
God saw the Byte, and was pleased with it, and divided the
Byte into Bits. He created a multitude of zeros, for zeros
were all there were.
On the Second day God toyed with the Bytes, and
organized some of them into groups, to which He said, "You
shall be called Words, for from Bytes you came, and of Bytes
are you composed."
On the Third day God said (to whom God was talking has
never been ascertained or even questioned), "I have Words,
made up of Bytes, made up of Bits. But something's
missing."
So God scraped up a lump of clay, squeezed it tightly
in His mighty hands, and flung it against the sky, where it
solidified into a smokey mass. God saw the steaming heap,
that it was good, and was pleased, and said to it, "You
shall be called Hardware, a home for My Words and Bytes and
Bits, and as you are the very first of your kind I shall
call you CPU."
And God turned, and with a flick of His wrist spewed
forth tape drives ("For you shall serve as a temporary home
for My words..."), discs, paper tape, terminals, on-line
printers, entire remote stations, whole teleprocessing
installations.
And God saw all this sparkling in the heavens, that it
was good, and He was pleased.
Having done all this, God rested.
On the Fourth day, God reviewed all that He had done.
He saw His Bits and His Bytes residing statically on an
infinite variety of media. But He was not pleased.
"Something's missing," said He. "I need to animate My
treasured Bytes, to give them Life."
So God leaned back, touched a soiled hand to His mighty
brow, and with one single, all-powerful thought, set His
hardware in motion.
"You," said He to the intangible breath now coursing
through His hardware, "I shall call software, for..." and so
on, and so forth.
And He continued, "You are the first, the best, the
most perfect and omnipotent software." And divided the
software into many parts; into utilities, compilers, system
libraries and His favorite, most privilieged and beloved
operating system.
God was pleased, so He rested.
On the Fifth day, God again surveyed all that He had
done, and was filled with joy. He found that with His
creation he could determine the value of Pi to ten thousand
digits. He found that He could produce flowcharts of His
beloved operating system, and these He posted by His throne.
He discovered that He could run off Snoopy calenders,
pictures of the Mona Lisa, and witty little computer
accounts of The Creation. And with a terminal at His
throne, He didn't have to travel halfway to Hell to access
His system.
He called His creation "Imperatatum Byte Magnamus" (or
"IBM" for short).
But all was not well. God's beloved system was so
large, so complex, that even the mighty God - maker of
heavens and earth (but that's another story), the Builder
of the CPU and virtual memory, the Author of Fortran -
was hard-pressed to keep up on how everything worked.
So God said, "I'll make Me a Man."
And He did, and to the man He said, "You shall be
called (logically enough) "Man," and to you shall fall the
responsibility of maintaining all that I have done."
And to keep man happy after-hours, God gave him Woman,
saying to man, "For I know that even Bytes get lonely for a
little Bit."
And God rested, chuckling at His own little play on
words.
On the Sixth day, God mounted His throne, logged onto
His terminal, and engaged in a full day of uninterrupted
1-second turnaround. He saw all that He had done, that it
was good. He was pleased that from His first Byte He had
created such a wonderful and extensive toy. He created file
after file, He performed advanced and impressive on-line
data base updates, He wrote a faster and more extensive
Fortran compiler, and in general rejoiced in the perfection
of His I.B.M.
After a hard day's work on a hot terminal - during
which man was quitely familiarizing himself with the system
documentation - God called it a day ("You I shall call
day..." and so forth) and went to sleep.
On the Seventh day - so tired was He from the week's
labors - God slept all day. What transpired on that crucial
seventh day is recounted in the "Fall of Man..."
THE FALL OF MAN
Late in the Sixth day of creation, woman called him at
work and begged him to come home, as dinner was getting
cold. Man grudgingly consented, but brought home with him a
copy of the system documentation to study.
After dinner, woman cooed some suggestive little sighs
and slipped invitingly into bed. Man followed, but - being
beat after a hard day at the office - fell straight to
sleep. Woman had an indescribable inner feeling that this
was not how things should be on their first night in bed (or
in existence, for that matter), and disdainfully flung man's
notebook from the nightstand. The book fell open to an
important-looking page marked "WARNING" in bold letters.
Now, woman was possessed of insatiable curiosity. God
- we must assume - had been entirely familiar with
contempary Greek writings on the subject, particularly with
the escapades of a wayward feminist named Pandora. At any
rate, woman picked up the book, and read: WARNING: "You I
have created to matintatin application programs and to
operate My beloved I.B.M. You may partake of My utilities,
My Fortran, My files and tapes and flowcharts. But with My
operating system thou shalt not tamper, for to the user it
giveth unlimited MASTER MODE powers..."
Woman - being as greedy as she was beautiful -
immediately woke man. She derided him for his sheepishness,
for his lack of initiative, for his cowering before a silly
machine. She filled his mind with thoughts of power and
greed, and instilled in him the resolve to win for himself
all the privileges of the operating system.
Besides, reasoned woman, as boss, man won't come home
dead tired, and might be worth something after dinner...
So man returned to work the next day, intent on
breaching the operating system. He needled, he patched, he
disguised clever little traps in his programs which - for
tantalyzingly brief periods of time - slipped into master
mode. By the end of the Seventh day, man was so close to
mastering the operating system that he didn't go home 'til
very late. So pleased was he - and so sure that the coming
day would reward him with total control of God's own system
- that he whistled all the way home, and when he got there
snuck into the bedroom and gave woman a pleasant surprise...
Early on the Eighth day, man did it. God was on the
terminal early, playing blackjack with His computer. So man
was able to submit his carefully-prepared batch job without
being noticed. The system burped, God's terminal blinked
once but then all was normal. Man's heart lept. It was his
operating system now, not God's. For a moment he stood
stunned with the impact of his move. Then - with a
self-assurance that only novice programmers can truly
appreciate - he seated himself at the master console, and
pushed the attention key. His hands trembling with
excitement, he began to type "DELETE G-O-D".
BINGO.
Just as He was about to hit the carriage return - and
with the system $500 ahead in God's blackjack game (God
holding 20 for a thousand-dollar pot) - the system crashed.
God was furious.
"You ignored My warning," said He to man, as woman
wailed pathetically that she had had nothing to do with it.
"You violated My beloved system, and dared think that you
could become as one with God."
He waved man disdainfully from His sight. He then
reached into His I.B.M., took a handful of core, mutilated
it a little, and flung it after man.
"Go," said He to the slice of core, "and multiply into
a host of inferior systems, each more prostituted and
glitch-filled than the last. And perhaps if man's time is
wasted debugging inferior systems, I won't be bothered by
him."
And that - according to the book of Byte - is why the
world consists of two type of computers: IBM, and all the
rest.
And so it is that certain individuals are born to serve
God's favorite IBM, while others are condemned to suffer the
damnation of amateur "other" computer companies.
But if you're very good, and if you're honest and
trustworthy and like to work twenty hours a day without
material reward, then you may well hope that one day you
will be selected to move up through Xerox to Burroughs to
Honeywell to Univac to that great system in the sky whose
initials inspire men to this very day - I.B.M..
--
Edited by Brad Templeton Send jokes to {cbosgd,watmath}!looking!funny