104 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
104 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
Date: Wednesday, 13 April 1983, 08:31-EST
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From: Hdt@MIT-OZ
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Subject: [Sibert at MIT-MULTICS: Computo, ergo sum. Happy All Fools Day.]
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To: "[DSk:humor;the future]"@MIT-MC
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Date: 1 April 1983 13:55 est
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From: Sibert at MIT-MULTICS (W. Olin Sibert)
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To: info-cobol at MIT-MC
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Re: Computo, ergo sum. Happy All Fools Day.
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Zork, RAMS and the Curse of Ra: Computo, ergo sum
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By Curt Suplee, Smithsonian magazine, April 1983
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The dread day arrives. There amidst a litter of packing materials,
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wreathed in a Gordian tangle of cables and prongs, lustrous and aloof as
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a UFO, sits his personal computer. Ticket to Tomorrowland. Passion and
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Nemesis.
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It looked positively servile in the showroon, hardly tougher than a
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toaster oven--fairly humming with selfess zeal to balance his budget and
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write his reports. But within hours, the neophyte realizes he is locked
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in an archetypal conflict, the most grueling confrontation between Man
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and machine since John Henry took on the steam drill. Three sleepless
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weeks, 400 instruction-manual pages and a near-divorce later, he will
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either crack or emerge transformed. And that, he begins to realize, is
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precisely the point...
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We are a nation divided. Forget unemployment, nuclear menace, herpes and
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cheese lines. The main megaworry in modern life is the personal
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computer.
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By the end of the decade, an estimated 29 million families will have
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one; last year alone about two million machines were sold for home use
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and another 1.2 million for small businesses, prompting Time magazine to
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devote its Man-of-the-Year cover to the screening of America. Yet few
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trends since the advent of rock-and-roll have so polarized the populace
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into rival anxieties: upwardly mobiles who feel that without one of the
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ubiquitous bleating boxes they'll miss the Progress Express and end up
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as obsolete as blacksmiths in the chip-shape future; phobics who cringe
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from the whole trend; skeptics, stupefied that an ostensibly sane adult
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would pay upwards of 2000 recession dollars for a glorified calculator
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that plays games called Zork, Pig Pen, Bounceoids and the Curse of Ra.
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But they're all missing the meaning of the cybernetic bonanza--the point
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that the new owner grasps with the first tremor of primordial terror
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when he unpacks his set: mastering the computer has become our new Rite
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of Passage.
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Societies have always employed stylized ceremonies to convert neophytes
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into certified members of the tribe. In primitive cultures, traditional
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patterns include the sacrifice of blood, ritual humiliation, temporary
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banishment in which the candidate must endure solitary vigil by night
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(symbolic death), and eventual return (symbolic rebirth) to the circle
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of elders, who invest the initiate with a secret vocabulary, new rights
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and powers.
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The rituals of computer mastery--a process as rigorous, arcane and
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exclusive as the Eleusinian mysteries--take a gilded bow to that same
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tradition.
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Stage One. Envious that computerized peers possess a potency he lacks,
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the supplicant makes a painful offering of dollars as evidence of
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earnestness. In exchange he is given a magical box and a set of cryptic
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incantations ("the following protocol parameters initialize asynchronous
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communications") and betakes himself to a private place. The humiliation
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phase begins immediately: the instructions are incomprehensible, the
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program will not run. In daily despair, he calls the computer-store
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shamans, only to be caustically reminded that he has overlookded the
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most self-evident procedure (ritual shame compounded by ritual insult):
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"It's all in the manual!"
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Stage Two. Most ancient rites of passage preclude commingling of sexes
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for the duration of the trial. Ditto for out latter-day counterpart.
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Hence the current media hysteria over the "computer widow" syndrome. As
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his dedication to the rites deepens, the neophyte typically returns home
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from work and locks himself in the basement with the box. During the
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dark hours, he endures heroic ordeals, grappling for mastery against
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such occult entities as Disk Error Read, Drive B, Format Failure and the
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soul-chilling Invalid Command. Throughout the night he repeats the
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ancient cry, "Oh, hell!" emblematic of mythic desent into Hades and
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death of the old self. It is perhaps no accident that some of the oldest
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and still most popular computer games are quest adventures similar to
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Dungeons and Dragons, involving perilous descents into cavernous mazes.
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What else is a microchip or a circuit board? It is not for nothing that
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programming adepts are called "computer wizards."
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Only the fittest survive. The vanquished acknowledge their unworthiness
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by placing a classified ad with the ritual phrase "must sell--best
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offer," and thereafter dwell in infamy, relegated to discussing gas
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mileage and lawn food.
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But if successful, you join the elite sodality that spends hours
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unpurifying the dialect of the tribe with arcane talk of bits and bytes,
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RAMS and ROMS, hard disks and baud rates. Are you obnoxious, obsessed?
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It's a modest price to pay. For you have tapped into the same awesome
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primal power that produces credit-card billing errors and lost plane
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reservations. Hail, postindustrial warrior, subduer of Bounceoids, pride
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of the cosmos, keeper of the silicone creed: Computo, ergo sum. The
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force is with you--at 110 volts. May your RAMS be fruitful and multiply.
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