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A Com
THE CREATION
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 privileged 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 quietly
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
maintain 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 types 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..
G25
THE STORY OF CREATION
or
THE MYTH OF URK
In the beginning there was data. The data was without form
and null, and darkness was upon the face of the csole; and the
Spirit of IBM was moving over the face of the market. And DEC
said, "Let there be registers"; and there were registers. And
DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the data from the
instructions. DEC called the data Stack, and the instructions
they called Code. And there was evening and there was morning,
one interrupt.
And DEC said, "Let there be a word in the midst of the data,
and let it separate the data from the registers." And DEC made
the word and separated the data which were under the Stack from
the registers which were above the memory. And it was so. And
DEC called the memory Core. And there was evening and there was
morning, a second interrupt.
And DEC said, "Let the data under the stack be gathered
together into one place, and let partitions appear." And it was
so. DEC defined the partitions as 4Kw, and the data that were
gathered together they called BLOCKS. And DEC saw that it was
good. And DEC said, "Let the CPU put for addresses, pointers
yielding bytes, and structures bearing words in which there is
data, each according to its type, upon the partition." And it was
so. And DEC saw that no bits stuck. And there was evening and
there was morning, a third interrupt.
And DEC said, "Let there be lights upon the console of the
CPU to separate the addresses from the data; and let them be for
signs and for diagnostics and for blinking. And it was so. And
DEC made the two great Buses, the greater Bus to rule the CPU,
and the lesser Bus to rule the peripherals; they made the peri-
pherals also. And DEC set them on line to give data to the CPU.
And DEC saw that it was good. And there was evening and there
was morning, a fourth interrupt.
And DEC said, "Let the Bus bring forth swarms of data, and
let stack pointers fly above the data across the partitions of
the Core." So Bell created the great C monsters.c and every a.out
that runs, with data swarming, and every pointer according to its
type." And Bell saw that is it was good. And Bell blessed them,
saying, "Be fruitful and fork and fill the partitions in the
Core, and let processes multiply." And there was evening and
there was morning, a fifth interrupt.
And Bell said, "Let there be UNIX." And it was so. And
Bell made the errors of the Bus according to their kinds and the
faults of memory according to their kinds, and everything that
core-dumps upon the disk according to its error. And Bell saw
that it was good. Then Bell said, "Let us make debuggers for the
image; and let them have dominion over the a.out, and over the
breakpoints, and over every address that sits upon the stack." So
Bell created parity; in the image of Core they created it; even
and odd they created it. And Bell checked it and saw that it was
good. And Bell said of UNIX "Behold, We have given you every
pointer yielding objects, and every identifier with value in its
address; you shall have them for food. And to every device on
the Bus, and to every program in the bin, and to everything that
creeps on the disk, everything that has the mode of allocation,
We have given inodes to check." And it was so. And Bell saw
everything that they had made, and behold, it was a lot better
that RSTS/E. And there was evening and there was morning, a
sixth interrupt.
Thus the hardware and the software were finished, and all
the host of system calls. On the seventh interrupt, it crashed.
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