Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/private/mpc93mar.zip/STSILICN.DAT

Text File | 1993-02-14 | 9KB | 163 lines

                              DOS Capital
                            by Saint $ilicon

                     If/Then "Brother Square-Roots"

     By: Jeffrey Armstrong,  APCUG-Member

     If you can park your head when all about you
     Are crashing theirs and blaming it on you,
     If you can trace yourself when all men doubt you,
     And make a linkage from their doubting too;
     If you can be in wait state and not be tired by waiting,
     Or using line feed, don't just deal in lines,
     Or being automated, not give way to hating,
     And yet don't lock your code, or patent your designs.

     If you can scroll--and not make screens your master;
     If you can blink--and not make dots your aim;
     If you can meet with thruput and with raster
     And read those two impressions just the same;
     If you can bear to see the code you've written
     Pirated by knaves, to make a product for fools,
     Or watch the strings you gave your like to smitten
     And loop to build them up with worn-out rules.

     If you can make one heap of all your winnings
     And risk it on a product based on MS-DOS,
     And lose, and start again at your beginnings
     And never breathe a word of it to your boss.
     If you can force your hard-disk, mouse and Windows
     To serve you even when the power is gone,
     And stay online when there are no more undos
     And a cryptic message says: "All memory is gone!"

     If you can talk at trade-shows and keep your virtue,
     Or talk with bankers--nor lose the common touch,
     If neither journalists nor shareholders can hurt you,
     And the IRS knows of you, but not too much.
     If you can fill the unforgiving minute
     With a trillion picoseconds of code that's run,
     Then yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
     And--which is more--you'll be a Nerd my son!

     Now that the Evil Empire has collapsed and IBM is known as the Unified
     Team a new enthusiasm is spreading throughout the dingy cubicles of
     corporate America, That champion of Democratic values, Chairman Bill, is
     preparing to spread another wave of pseudo-macintoshism, with an
     upgrade to Windows--so called because it is a pain to use.  I mean
     really, what is a PC with Windows?  A Hackintosh?  A MacInDOS?  A Xerox
     of a Macintosh?  How about a PC in drag--or is it click and drag?
     What a GUI guy.  The Nerd knows how to dress.  And guess what you see
     when you look inside Windows?  Curtains for IBM.  But hey no problemo,
     they can just make a Home Computer.  IBM Home Computer, is that like
     McDonalds Home Cooking?  The PS/1, which stood for:  Please Sell One.

     And what is DOS anyway?  Just CP/M with an attitude right.  You know DOS
     was written by some stoned out programmer, because upper memory can only
     be used by operations that load high.  Yes it is a DOS eat DOS world.
     And the difference between the DOS 640K barrier and the Berlin Wall is
     the Berlin wall is gone.  Yes, DOS uses a colon, for reasons that should
     be obvious.  C>, which means anything would be greater than DOS.  Me,
     I'm DOStrophobic, that's the fear of being locked in a small room with
     an XT running MS-DOS.  But I get by on my 386 SX with a DOS shell and
     Windows.  Sure I use a PC and a Mac, I'm RAMbidextrous and Mathochistic.
     I mean DOS is everywhere, like Herpes.  If you do a lot of interfacing
     you're bound to have it.

     Why even the Russians have DOS now.  It's called DOSvadanya 5.0.  It
     says goodbye but it won't let you out of the program.  Divides the hard
     disk into two large inefficient blocks--Eastern Block and Western
     Block.  "Ees 256 KGB comrade."  Was originally written for ICBM's.  Ees
     twisted-pairestroika.  Also the Germans has a DOS.  It's a query
     based system:  Vas is DOS?  Ya volt mein herr.  Eine Pixel (a pixel is a
     male pixie.)  And the Swedes have a DOS now--Hagen DOS.  And there's a
     New Age DOS:  RAM DOS.  Beep here now.  When you open a file it asks:
     "Why have you created this for yourself?"  And when you logoff it says
     "Thanks for sharing."  My favorite is the new Mexican DOS--DOS Equis:
     It runs real slow and goes down from one 'til three in the afternoon.

     When I think of where we're going I just get carried away.  CD ROMs,
     multi-media answering machines, HDTV where everything ends the way you
     want.  Cyberspace, virtual reality, Christmas in the year 2000.

     Slobber space--the ultimate journey, the frontal-lobe frontier.  That
     shopping mall in the human brain where seductive neon teenieboppers of
     the mind await.  Where violent gangs of free-radicals roam the dark
     alleys of your subconscious mind.  And the clever sub-locations of
     renegade cells invite you to join their cancerous rebellion against the
     powers that be, in a grim struggle for physical immortality.  Slobber
     space, that drooling creation of zit-faced technofiles with nothing
     better to do than jack themselves into oblivion.  Their maggot white
     bodies rotting from years of dietary neglect.  Simpering casualties of
     the Cartesian split.  Latter-day Calvanists, Methodists,
     Press-any-key-bertarians. leaders of the Processant reformation, late in
     the age of PCs.  They wait for the final rapture to be swept away in one
     great apocalyptic synapse Or gate orgasm, lewd and lascivious logic,
     trigonometric wet dream, asexual asymmetrical, clone with the wind.
     Scarlett O'Hara in a Styrofoam cup of synthesized neurotransmitters.
     This is cyber-bunk, where no one gives a damn.  Yogi-Bear Yogis, mind by
     Disney, body by mistake, the lost boys of never-never LAN.  The
     scrolly-grail and a Merlin who programs in C. Trying to storm the walled
     fortress of the human mind. Storm troopers of Aristotelian logic,
     Symbol-Simons, PI'd pipers, leading the children to Binary Fairyland.
     Where Synth-derella dances with the Clone Prince NOTzis, SIG heil!  Ve
     have vays to make you think.  Post-industrial nanarchists--nothing
     exists except my computer.

     Typer, typer burning bright, in the office late at night, what immortal
     wand or key, could frame thy failsafe circuitry, in what distant
     factories burned the fire of thine ICs.  Ice seas of frozen emotion,
     great desserts of data, arid alpha-numeric moon, circling a green planet
     that is just out of reach.

     Slobber-space the ultimate frontier.  Training wheels on a five-year-old
     mind driving in circles around a body it doesn't understand.
     Slobber-space, an asphalt parking lot in an astral shopping mall,
     designed to sell hardware no one needs--hyperspace!

     Sometimes people say to me "Get serious, St.  $ilicon."  And I say "I
     thought you'd never ask."

     Mainframe brain, my neural-net,
     This computer is all wet.
     Wet-ware, share-ware, mind on line,
     Hard-disks stacked within my spine.
     Semi-conducting bones, the rack,
     The next instruction in the stack,
     Parallel-processing runs this dream,
     Teraflops, this earth machine
     Edits programs on the fly,
     Read the data with your eye.
     Fiber-optic, laser disk,
     Cryptic message: life is risk.
     Instructions written in our genes,
     Heuristic, cybernetic, machines,
     Plug-compatible, full of juice,
     A virus able to reproduce,
     With subroutines and code that's tight,
     The angels program late at night,
     With wires leading to the source,
     That Hacker in the sky, of course.
     And there a mighty dynamo
     Spins the light that makes it glow,
     Computer with one extra part,
     The algorithm of the heart.

  ************************************************************************

  Jeffrey Armstrong AKA Saint $ilicon, is a humorist, published poet,
  screenplay writer and songwriter and an internationally known
  professional speaker.  He worker for seven years in Silicon Valley for
  computer firms in sales and marketing.  After that experience, he was
  given the divine mission of bringing laughter into the endless corridors
  and cubicles of the corporate world.  To this end he founded the worlds
  only High-tech religion, C.H.I.P., the Church of Heuristic Information
  Processing.  Since then, in the guise of Saint $ilicon, he has been
  performing for corporate groups around the world as the first High-tech
  comedian.  He has had numerous appearances on national television and
  radio.  As a creative consultant to technology firms he produces radio
  commercials, special promotions, trade show events and specially
  tailored comedy to enlighten, enliven and entertain.