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1993-02-14
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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.