Chapter 224

This explanation is compliments of Gnostic ‎

God and IBM

In the beginning, there was chaos and the Universe was without form and void. The Lord looked upon His domain and decided to declare His presence. “I be” he said, then to correct his grammar added “am.” If the Lord had decided to work on irregular verb conjugation first, this wouldn’t have happened. God would later curse the English language for its part, but in that moment IBM came into being. The Lord looked out upon the IBM He had created and said “This is good.” That’s what He said, but He shook his head, wondered what the boys at the User Group would say, split the light from the dark and went to bed. Thus passed the Beginning and the end of the first day. On the second day, the Lord summoned IBM unto His presence. “There is chaos out there, and the Universe is without form and void. I must correct this and I can use your help. Is there anything you can do for me?”

“I can take care of form,” IBM replied. “Put me in charge of computers and I will take care of form for you.”

The Lord thought that this was good and said “Let there be computers. Let IBM have my powers of creation that pertain to computers and form.” Thus saying, the Lord went off to His second day’s work while IBM created the 1401.

On the third day, while the Lord was out, IBM decided to subdivide the assigned task. “Let there be systems that make the computer work and let them be called Operating Systems. Let there also be systems that make use of the computer and let them be called Application Systems.” Thus, there came into being both Operating Systems and Application Systems, but there were no programmers.

The next morning IBM had to give the Lord a status report.

“What did you do yesterday?” the Lord asked.

“I invented the operating system” IBM replied.

“You did?” the Lord shuddered. “Oh dear.”

“Yes I did,” IBM confirmed, “but I find I need something you alone can provide.”

“And what is that?”

“I need programmers to use my computers, to operate my operating system and to apply my applications.”

“That can’t be done now,” said the Lord. “This is only the fourth day and there won’t be people until the sixth day.”

“I need programmers and I need them now. If they can’t be people they can’t be people, but we have to work this out today.”

“Give me some specifications and I’ll see what I can do.” IBM hastily worked up specs for programmers (are specs ever anything other than hasty) and the Lord reviewed them. The Lord knew the specs weren’t sufficient but followed them anyway. He also made some programmers that did just what programmers were supposed to do, just to spite IBM. The programmers and IBM spent the rest of the day creating the Assembler and FORTRAN. On the morning of the fifth day, IBM reported to the Lord once again.