April 2014
Volume 29 Number 4
Don't Get Me Started : We Didn't Start Computing
David Platt | April 2014
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I’ve always admired the April Fools’ Day column as an art form. The best I’ve ever heard of is the April 1, 1919, cover of the British humor magazine Punch, which supposedly screamed: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! War Fought By Mistake!” (And if it didn’t really say that, well, April fool, it should have.)
I’ve also admired Billy Joel since he delivered a superb concert at my undergrad university, back before he got famous. You’ve probably heard his historical song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” which uses tiny snippets to narrate history from 1950 onward: “Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray ….” So for your amusement, I’ve rewritten that song to narrate the progression of our industry.
I offered to sing the song onstage at Build for only $5,000. Microsoft countered with $10,000 if I didn’t. So I’m getting my revenge by publishing it here. You will probably enjoy it most if you read it while listening to the original song (bit.ly/1fnHqf0). And if you’re crazy enough or masochistic enough to sing it in public, you can find an instrumental karaoke version at bit.ly/1k5RLhS. Go to it, my brave readers. As we geeks say, “a-01two, 10two, 11two, 100two …”
Alan Turing, Frederick Brooks, John von Neumann, Donald Knuth
Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Three-finger salute
Z-80, first for me, Kernighan and Ritchie C
Apple and the Macintosh in 1984
Peter Norton, Byte magazine, “The Soul of a New Machine”
PDP-8, IBM, 8-inch floppy CP/M
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Wang, Data General, DEC
Commodore! 64! I can’t take it anymore!
We didn’t start computing
It was always burning since a brain’s been churning
We won’t stop computing
No we won’t stop it, but we’ll try to top it
Bjarne Stroustrup, C++, Bill Gates, Windows, Microsoft
Minesweeper and Solitaire, Dummies tearing out their hair
World-wide-Web, Tim Berners-Lee, CompuServe and Prodigy
Dave Cutler, NT, want to strangle Clippy
Amazon and Pets.com, Y2K doesn’t bomb
Circuit City, Googleplex, what the hell is ActiveX?
COM OLE and DDE, Microsoft monopoly
Janet Reno! DOJ! What else do I have to say?
We didn’t start computing
It was always burning since a brain’s been churning
We won’t stop computing
No we won’t stop it, but we’ll try to top it.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Oracle and Ellison
Charles Petzold, Seymour Cray, Google Doodle every day
Camera phones, Nintendo Wii, Roomba Kindle Blackberry
Jeff Bezos, Craig’s list, Donald Norman, no more Borland
PageMaker, Acrobat, software legend David Platt
Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, Vista is no-go
YouTube, Elon Musk, .NET Framework, Lotus Notes
Steve Jobs, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad
We didn’t start computing
It was always burning since a brain’s been churning
We won’t stop computing
No we won’t stop it, but we’ll try to top it
Dot-com bubble, Xbox, Google Chrome and Firefox
Steve Ballmer, David Pogue, Zynga Facebook Zuckerberg
Alan Cooper, Clippy dead, GPS and Javaheads
Jakob Nielsen, LinkedIn, Silverlight and Python
Netflix, Apple hype, PayPal Yahoo eBay Skype
XSD! USB! TLAs are BFD!
We didn’t start computing
It was always burning since a brain’s been churning
We won’t stop computing
No we won’t stop it, but we’ll try to top it
Angry Birds, Snapchat, Candy Crush and Black Hat
Azure Cloud, eHarmony, Surveymonkey WebMD
Uber Quber Chatroulette, Samsung Android Babelfish
Deep Throat, Deep Blue, NSA is watching you,
Wikipedia, Instagram, Bing, IMDB and Spam
Twitter Tumblr MSN, Ballmer out Nadella in,
MOOCs, Nooks, Google Glass, Jobs and Ritchie bite the dust.
Windows 8! What’s its fate? Will the next one be too late?
We didn’t start computing
It’s been always burning since a brains been churning
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on and on and on and on and on?
David S. Platt teaches programming .NET at Harvard University Extension School and at companies all over the world. He’s the author of 11 programming books, including “Why Software Sucks” (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006) and “Introducing Microsoft .NET” (Microsoft Press, 2002). Microsoft named him a Software Legend in 2002. He wonders whether he should tape down two of his daughter’s fingers so she learns how to count in octal. You can contact him at rollthunder.com.