From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 23:51:33 MST
Spike Jones wrote:
>
> Eliezer gets the prize for the funniest computer oldtimer story to date. {8^D
> spike
That prize is long since taken, Spike. A few verses seem to be missing
from the version I remember, but here it is:
==
"When I Was a Boy"
By Frank Hayes
Copyright © 1997 by Frank Hayes, Firebird Arts & Music (BMI)
When I was a boy, our Nintendo
Was carved from an old Apple tree
And we used garden hose to connect it
To our steam-powered color tv.
But it still beat that ancient Atari
'Cuz I almost went blind, don'tcha know,
Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game
Hooked up to the radio.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran
And the PC was only a toy
And we did our computing by gaslight
When I was a boy.
When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea--
Our baud rate was eight bits an hour,
And our IP address was just 3.
And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
is too slow, oughtta cut out your bitchin',
'Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Two-tran
And the mainframe was only a toy
And we did our computing by torchlight
When I was a boy.
When I was a boy our IS shop
Built relational tables from wood,
And we wrappered our data in oilcloth
To preserve it the best that we could.
And we carried our bits in a bucket,
And our mainframe weighed 900 tons,
And we programmed in ones and in zeros
And sometimes we ran out of ones.
And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even One-tran
And the abacus? Only a toy!
And we did our computing in primordial darkness
When I was a boy.
==
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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