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Computer Terminology
Are you terrified of your computer? Do you feel out of place and overwhelmed when your friends or coworkers start spouting reams and reams of technical jargon that you will never understand? Then this article is for you! We'll help you get over your fear of technical terminology by tickling your funny bone. We'll start with some definitions that SHOULD be true, and we hope are entertaining.

486 - The average IQ needed to understand a P.C.

State-of-the-art - Any computer you can't afford.

Obsolete - Any computer you own.

Microsecond - The time it takes for your State-of-the-art-computer to become obsolete.

Syntax Error - Hi, I want to buy a computer and money is no object.

GUI (pronounced gooey) - What your computer becomes after spilling your coffee on it.

Computer Chip - Any starchy food stuff consumed in mass quantities while programming.

Keyboard - The standard way to generate computer errors.

Mouse - An advanced input device to make computer errors easier to generate.

Floppy - The state of your wallet after purchasing a computer.

Hard Drive - The sales technique employed by computer salesmen.

Portable Computer - A device invented to force businessmen to work at home, on vacation and on business trips.

Disk Crash - A typical computer response to any critical deadline.

Power User - Anyone who can format a disk from DOS.

System Update - A quick method of trashing ALL of your software.

SacrificialLoon

Some geek humor...

Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing. One evening he arrived home just as the sun was crashing, and had parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."

Mini was her name. She was delightfully engineered with eyes like COBOL and a Prime mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals networking all over the place.

He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 32-bit floating point processors and inquired, "How are you, Honeywell?" "Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.

Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone tonight," he said. "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a byte to eat, and maybe we could get offset later on." Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then transmitted 8K. "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable. I wonder if she'd like my firmware?"

They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche and chips and a bucket of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional acknowledgments, although in reality he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old, Would-you-like-to-see-my-benchmark routine. But Mini was again one step ahead.

Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM," she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its output buffer, a hangup that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off.

Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the DEC and opened her divide filed to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.

"No, no!" she cried, "You're not shielded!"

"Reset, baby," he replied, "I've been debugged."

"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child processes," she protested.

"Don't run away," he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."

"No, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design philosophy."

Micro was locked in by this stage, though, and could not be turned off. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep. "Computers!" she thought, as she compiled herself, "All they think about is hex!"

There's no place like 127.0.0.1

Elsewhere

BlackPearl

LtCmd.Lore

Elsewhere

SacrificialLoon

SirNose586

Warlock

HalfWayThere

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