Amy Welborn is visiting New York City, and she has stumbled across a strange temple to an interesting local religion, which you can see by clicking here.
Who can contemplate what holy wars have been fought in corporate offices, in suburban homes, and on user forums over this religion and its rival? Of course, you can look at the competing scriptures of each to see why.
From the one side, we have: "And the master gave them a choice: would they select the partially eaten apple, pleasing to the eye and good to the taste, or the flag of four colors? And those who chose the apple, lo! they learned much that was good and some that was evil. But those who chose the flag were of woe, for they encountered the Blue Screen of Death, and the sorrows of hard drive crashes and plagues of viruses entered the world by their choice."
And from the other: "In the beginning was Word, and everybody used it, and it put squiggly lines everywhere when you wrote too much, and it flagged the passive voice and made you write Business English whether you wanted to or not, and it was good. But then arose the heathen, the rival word-processing companies that claimed to be better than Word, and the blasphemers. And then arose even worse, the heretics of the apple who made word processing software absolutely free and open source, which is an abomination in the eyes of all right-thinking people. But still Word was used by nearly all, except people who wanted to compose anything other than a memo without getting all those squiggly lines. So it was still good. But not as good as before."
After decades of flame wars and open hostility, the two religions have achieved an uneasy coexistence for the most part. And of course, there are other, smaller computer faiths out there--some of them quite strong (I speak of the Linux sect, for one). We should all respect each other, whatever our software or hardware choices.
Of course, as for me and my house, we stick with Macs.
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APL is the ultimate programming language. You can type a random line from the Iliad in Greek into an APL interpreter and it will file your tax returns from a random year after your death. This will be useful since Obama plans to dig up and prosecute the dead to pay for his largesse to Goldman Sachs and their haverim.
It looks like some "pious scribe" changed the original text which read "in the beginning was WordStar.
WordStar was the crankiest, #$%@ inducing piece of garbage ever passed off as basic software. I did homework on it in high school and would frequently ask to use the manual typewriter instead.
This reminds me of the excellent Lord Dunsany tale, 'Chu-bu and Sheemish.' Those interested can find it at http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/d_chu-bu.htm
I find it incredible that no readers of this blog (or this post) are familiar with the Aegis operating system of Apollo Computer or with the APL programming language.
I suppose no one knows the Amiga or Commodore 64 either. Sad.
I know the Commodore 64! My grandfather, a man with a grade school education who worked his whole life as an inventor for Brach's candy company, bought one for us kids, and insisted that this whole computer thing was going to be important. He saw the beginnings of the computer age, but he'd be pretty amazed with what we have now.
My favorite computer game of all time is still the old text-based "Adventure" game. No amount of gory graphics strikes fear into the heart like the sentence: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike....."
XYZZY, my friends.
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