Rabbie
Super Moderator
- Local time
- Today, 15:45
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2007
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- 5,906
In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was zero, nothing. On the first day, He toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and "active low" signals didn't yet exist). On the second day, The Board wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn't. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day (and His first all nighter) reconstructing the universe. On the third day, the bit cried "Oh Lord! If you exist, give me a sign! " And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realised the "new and improved" wouldn't do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit, or the Sign bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honoured. On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with "add" and "logical shift" instructions. And the original bit discovered that by performing a single shift instruction, it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realised the importance of computer security. On the fifth day, God created the first mid life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU. with wonderful features, and said "Screw all that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply!" And God saw that was good. On the sixth day, God got a bit over confident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimising compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, micro¬interrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays (Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday). On the seventh day, God had His day of rest. The IT department, which was singularly unqualified to do anything other than call in a service engineer when something went wrong, got above itself and invented "Computer Policy". Whilst God continued to take His ease, a policy decision was issued after the IT department hired a consultant called Bill Gates. An Engineering Change Notice soon followed, introducing Windows into the Universe. Consequently, the Universe hasn't worked right since and, through no fault of His own, God invented Hell.
