The Coffee Place's Joke Stack
THE FALL OF MAN
Late in the sixth day of creation, Woman called Man 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 incitingly 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 night stand. The book fell open to an important-looking page marked WARNING in bold red letters. Now, Woman was possessed of insatiable curiosity. God - we must assume - been entirely familiar with contemporary 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:
*** W A R N I N G ***
You I have created to maintain application programs and to operate my beloved IBM. You may partake of my utilities, my fortran, my files and tapes and flow charts. But with my operating system thou shalt not tamper, for to the user it giveth unlimited master mode powers...
* * *
Woman - being as greedy an 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 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 the next day, intent on breaching the operating system. He needled, he patched, he disguised clever little traps in his programs which - for tantalizingly 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 till very late.
* * *
So pleased was he - that the coming day would reward him with total control of God's own operating system - that he whistled all the way home, and when he got there, he snuck into the bedroom and gave Woman 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 leapt. It was his operating system now, not God's. For a moment he stood stunned with the impact of his move. Then, with the self-assurance that only novice programmers can truly understand, he hit the attention key. His hands trembling with excitement, he began to 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 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 IBM, 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 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 Univac, to Burroughs, to Honeywell, to Xerox, to that great system in the sky whose initials inspire men to this very day - IBM.
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Changes were last made on 11-20-2001
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