Friday, January 1, 2010

The Ghosts of Computing, Past, Present and Future

I hope you enjoy this little piece of poetic (?) foolishness to mark the New Year:


Last night I read a Christmas Book
By Dickens, Charles, I think.
But all at once I fell asleep -
It must have been the drink!

Methought I saw a vision strange
Come slowly into view,
Of IT past and present
And of the future too.


I saw the ghosts of IT past,
I shudder just to say,
With paper tape and overlays,
And punched cards by the tray.

I saw the mighty IBM
With mainframes in profusion,
In massive data centres
Where all was pure confusion.

A multitude of programmers
Their duties never shirked,
Writing Cobol programs
Which never ever worked.

Some users too I also saw
In poses not so quaint,
Looking quite unhappy
And making loud complaint.

And last I saw the CIO.
With worry bent and stooped,
His eyes were glazed, his hair was grey,
And he looked truly pooped....


Then suddenly the vision changed
As stormclouds crossed the skies,
And present-day computing
Appeared before my eyes.

I saw the mighty Microsoft
With Governments pursuing,
And Oracle and S-A-P
Their profits large reviewing.

That multitude of programmers
Still worked there with a will,
Writing C# programs now,
Which did not function still.

The users too were still around,
Unhappy to the bone,
Serving up their loud complaints
In strident, querulous tone.

The CIO was there as well,
And clearly wasn't winning.
His face was lined with worry
And his hair was white and thinning.


And then my vision changed again,
And in a shadowy haze
The future of computing
Appeared before my gaze.

I hid my eyes in abject fear
And hoped to end the night -
The future of computing
Was not a pretty sight!

Web 10.0 was all the rage,
Bill Gates had done a flitter,
And everybody's ERP
Was set to run on Twitter!

A multitude of programmers
Still worked 'till they turned pale,
Using abstruse languages
On programs doomed to fail.

The users now were very quiet
And kept their words at bay,
Because they knew, no matter what,
They'd never get their way.

The CIO was there, in tears
And climbing up the wall.
And in the gloomy light I saw
He had no hair at all.


And then at last my dream had gone
And I from sleep awoke.
A nightmare foul it all had been,
Enough to make you choke.

The ghosts have gone, the gloom has cleared,
I'm filled once more with cheer.
Computing really helps the world,
It's still a great career!

The future's really looking bright,
The past was not so bad,
And we can make this great New Year
The best we've ever had.

So, on this happy New Year's Day
Regards I'd like to show
To programmers, to users,
And the good old CIO!


Have a great 2010!!!