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Du er her: Skole > The creation

The creation

Skapelsesteorien. Dataorientert.

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Engelsk
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20.05.2000


In the beginning, all was void, with the spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.

 

Then God said: LET THERE BE BYTE, and there was byte. God saw the byte, and was pleased with it, and divided the byte in bits. He created a multitude of similar bytes, all identical in their ethereal perfection, and all containing zeros, for zeros were all there were.

 

On the second day God toyed with the bytes, and organized them into groups to which he said: YOU SHALL BE CALLED WORDS, FOR FROM BYTES YOU CAME AND OF BYTES YOU ARE COMPOSED.

 

And God saw the words, that they were good and was pleased. On the third day God said (to whom God was talking has never has never been ascertained or even questioned): I HAVE WORDS, MADE UP OF BYTES, MADE UP OF BITS, BUT SOMETHING’S MISSING.

 

So God scraped up a lump of clay, squeezed it tightly in his mighty hands, and flung it against the sky, where it solidified into a smoky mass. God saw the steaming heap, that it was good and said to it: YOU SHALL BE CALLED HARDWARE, A HOME FOR MY BYTES AND BITS, AND AS YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST OF YOUR KIND I SHALL CALL YOU CPU.

 

And God turned, and with a flick of his wrist spew forth tape drives (FOR YOU SHALL BE TEMPORARILY A HOME FOR MY WORDS...), stations, whole teleprocessing installations.

 

And God saw all this sparkling in the heavens, that it was good and he was pleased.

 

Having done all this, God rested.

 

On the fourth day, God reviewed all that he had done. He saw his bits and his bytes statistically on an infinite variety of media. But he was not satisfied. SOMETHING’S MISSING, said he, I NEED TO ANIMATE MY TREASURED BYTES TO GIVE THEM LIFE.

 

So God leaned back, touched a soiled hand to his mighty brow, and with one single, all-powerful thought set his hardware in motion.

 

YOU said he to the intangible breath now coursing through his hardware, I SHALL CALL SOFTWARE, FOR ...(so on, and so forth.)

 

And he continued: YOU ARE THE FIRST, THE BEST, THE MOST PERFECT AND OMNIPOTENT SOFTWARE. And God divided the software in many parts, into utilities,compilers, system libraries and his favorite, most privileadged and beloved operating system.

 

God was pleased, so he rested.

 

On the fifth day, God again surveyed all that he had done, and was filled with joy. He found that with his creation he could determine the value of pi to ten thousand digits. He found that he could produce flowcharts of his beloved operating system, and these he posted by his throne. He discovered that he could run off Snoopy calendars, pictures of Mona Lisa, and witty little computer accounts of creation. And with at terminal at his throne, he didn’t have to travel halfway to hell to access his system.

 

He called his creation IMPERATUM BYTE MAGNAMUS (or IBM for short).

 

But all was not well. God’s beloved system was so large, so complex, that even the mighty God - maker of heavens and earth (but that’s another story), the builder of cpu and virtual memory, the author of fortran - even that God was hard-pressed to keep up on how everything worked.

 

So God said I’LL MAKE ME A MAN.

 

And he did, and to the man he said YOU SHALL BE CALLED (logically enough) "MAN" AND TO YOU SHALL FALL THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAINTAINING ALL THAT I HAVE DONE.

 

And to keep Man happy after-hours, God gave him Woman, saying to Man FOR I KNOW THAT EVEN BYTES GET HUNGRY FOR A LITTLE BIT.

 

And God rested, chuckling at his own play on words.

 

On the sixth day, God mounted his throne, logged onto his terminal, and engaged in a full day of uninterrupted 1-second turnaround. He saw all that he had done, that it was good. He was pleased that from his first byte he had created such a wonderful and extensive toy. He created file after file, he performed advanced and impressive on-line data base updates, he wrote a faster and more extensive fortran compiler, and in general rejoiced in the perfection of his IBM.

 

After a hard day’s work on a hot terminal - during which Man was quietly familiarizing himself with the system documentation - God called it a day (YOU I SHALL CALL DAY... and so forth and so on.)

 

On the seventh day - so tired was he form the week’s labors - God slept all day. What transpired on that crucial seventh day is recounted in THE FALL OF MAN...

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 invitingly 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 existance, 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 flowcharters. 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 priviledges 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 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 Xerox, to Burroughs, to Honeywell, to Univac, to that great system in the sky whose initials inspire men to this very day - IBM.

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