A New Religion

One night, my friend was home in Santa Cruz, working on his computer Lightning struck the satellite dish on the roof of the house. He was rendered unconcious, and when he awoke, the Keyboard Prayer was on the screen :

Our program, who art in memory, HELLO by thy name,
Forgive us our I/O errors as we forgive those whose logic circuits are faulty.
Lead us not into frustration,and deliver us from power surges.
For thine is the algorithm, the application and the solution,
looping forever and ever. RETURN.'"

On this incident, he was given the name St. $ilicon. The Giver of Data instructed him to form the church of Heuristic Information Processing, the first user-friendly religion.

This was in 1984; since then, the fourth-quarter prophet and strict fun-damentalist has been ministering to the D-based and D-filed. He usually wears a white suit with a button that asks: 'Has your data been saved?'

His act includes the 'Sermon on the Monitor': 'Dearly C-loved, we are assembled here together because PCing is believing. We're here to console you, ASCII and ye shall receive. We say there is a life worth debugging. Data, data, everywhere and not a thought to think, that's the problem... Friend, perhaps you know someone out there with a terminal illness -- some poor hacker with bloodshot eyes in data distress -- who's been attacked by the evil one, Glitch, and his wicked helper, Missingstuffinfiles. Even if your data has been blown all to HAL there's not a thing we can do to bring it back, but we can solace you in your hour of need.'

From the Binary Bible,which St. $ilicon translated from the ancient Greek, the first book SYSGEN I:i 'In the beginning the Giver of Data generated silicon and carbon and the system was without architecture, and uninitialized, and randomness was upon the arrangement of the matrix.'

Announcements:

For cathode-lics - a new high school (Our Lady of Perpetual Upgrades - we don't have nuns, we have nulls) and a new junior high ( PCjr - the immaculate deception).
Also performs curcuit-cisions and bar-code mitzvahs.
The Binary Bible includes the commandment:

Thou shalt not pirate programs

The 23rd PROM "Yea, though I commute to the valley each day, I fear no evil, for my Mazda is running. You prepare a desk for me in the office of my competitors."
For Bootists, a mantra: Ohms EPROM RAM ROM.
For CMOSlems, readings from the CORE-RAM.
Hymn number 1101101
"Amazing space, how sweet it is, To have a disk like thee, My files were lost but now they're found, There's room on my PC."

The end of his pitch promises Nerdvana, and words that restoreth the scroll:
"There's no need to abandon hope, all ye who press ENTER;
in the END everything will be right-justified."

S.KRAUSE

A New Religion