The Creation

What a shame that God gave up his franchise and let this crew in
but who in all honesty would have bought shares in the infant
Microsoft on the strength of the original staff group?

The Creation.

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 into Bits. He created a multitude of zeros, for zeros were all there were.

On the Second day God toyed with the Bytes, and organized some of them into groups, to which He said, "You shall be called Words, for from Bytes you came, and of Bytes are you composed."

On the Third day God said (to whom God was talking has never been ascertained or even questioned), "I have Words, made up of Bytes, made up of Bits. But something is 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 was pleased, and said to it, "You shall be called Hardware, a home for My Words and 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 spewed forth tape drives ("For you shall serve as a temporary home for My words..."), discs, paper tape, terminals, on- line printers, entire remote stations, and 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 residing statically on an infinite variety of media. But He was not pleased. "Something is 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..." and so on, and so forth.

And He continued, "You are the first, the best, the most perfect and omnipotent software." And divided the software into many parts; into utilities, compilers, system libraries and His favorite, most privileged 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 the Mona Lisa, and witty little computer accounts of The Creation. And with a terminal at His throne, He didn't have to travel halfway to Hell to access His system.

He called His creation "Imperatatum 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 the CPU and virtual memory, the Author of Fortran - 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 lonely for a little Bit."

And God rested, chuckling at His own little 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 I.B.M.

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 went to sleep.

On the Seventh day - so tired was He from the week's labors - God slept all day. What transpired on that crucial seventh day is recounted in the "Fall of Man..."

Keep watching the proverbial Blog near you for the "Fall Of Man".