Computer Quotes and Jokes
The following are some quotations and jokes about computers and the
Web I found amusing or enlightening. Sections include definitions,
E-mail and lists, OS chickens and
viruses, computer gender and links
to poems and papers. You can also send me comments
or suggestions, or return to my home page.
The following was from a Green Mountain-based webmaster.
The Vermonter's Guide to Computer Lingo
- Log On: Makin' the wood stove hotter.
- Log Off: Don't add wood.
- Monitor: Keep an eye on the wood stove.
- Download: Gettin' the firewood off the pickup.
- Mega Hertz: When yer not carefull downloadin' (watch th' toes!)
- Floppy Disk: Whacha get from pilin' too much firewood.
- Disk Operating System: The equipment the Doc uses when you have a floppy
disk.
- RAM: The hydraulic thingy that makes the woodsplitter work.
- Hard Drive: Gettin' home in mud season.
- Prompt: What you wish the mail was in mud season.
- Windows: What to shut when it's 30 below.
- Screen: What you need for black fly season.
- Byte: What black flies do.
- Chip: What to munch on.
- Micro Chip: What's left in the bag when the chips are gone.
- Infrared: Where the left-over's go when Fred's around.
- Modem: What you did to the hay fields.
- Dot Matrix: John Matrix's wife.
- Printer: Someone who can't write in cursive.
- Lap Top: Where little kids feel comfy
- Keyboard: Where you hang your keys.
- Software: Them plastic eatin' utensils.
- 486: One of them fancy imported cars.
- Mouse: What eats the horses' grain in the barn.
- Main Frame: The part of the barn that holds the roof up.
- Port: Fancy wine.
- Enter: C'mon in!
- Random Access Memory: You can't remember how much that new rifle cost
when your wife asks.
- Digital: Like those numbers that flip on your alarm clock.
- Apple: If you don't know, I ain't tellin'.
- Program: What's on TV when there's reception.
- CD ROM: The furriner at the bank that sells retirement accounts.
- DIN: The noise at the barn dance.
- Laser: Someone less ambitious than you.
- Line In: Whatcha do when you go fishin' or whacha dry yer laundry on.
Jon Foglein
Learning About Programming From Mom
* Mother taught the IF ... THEN ... ELSE structure: "If it's snowing,
then put your boots on before you go to school; otherwise just wear your
shoes."
* Mother explained the difference between batch and transaction processing:
"We'll wash the white clothes when we get enough of them to make a
load, but we'll wash these socks out right now by hand because you'll need
them this afternoon."
* Mother also taught me about linked lists. Once, for a birthday party,
she laid out a treasure hunt of ten hidden clues, with each clue telling
where to find the next one, and the last one leading to the treasure. She
then gave us the first clue.
* Mother understood about parity errors. When she counted socks after
doing the laundry, she expected to find an even number and groaned when
only one sock of a pair emerged from the washing machine. Later she applied
the principles of redundancy engineering to this problem by buying our
socks three identical pairs at a time. This greatly increased the odds
of being able to come up with at least one matching pair. Unknown
You know you've been on line too long when
- You start introducing yourself as "Jim @ oneonta.edu"
- You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check
it again.
- Your phone bill is delivered in a box.
- All of your friends have an @ in their names.
- You get a tatoo that says, "This body best viewed with Netscape
4.0."
- You never have to deal with the busy signals because you never log
off.
- You start tilting your head sideways whenever you smile ;-)
- Your spouse says communication is important in a marriage, so you buy
another computer and install another phone line so that the two of you
can chat.
- Your computer goes down and you haven't logged in for two hours. You
start to tremble. You pick up the phone and dial your Internet access number.
You try to mimic computer noise in order to connect. You succeed! (From
the User Group Forum, AoL)
Go to the top of
the page, or return to my home page?
Here are net terms appropriately handled:
World Wide Web or the Web (caps)
home page (2 words, lower-cased)
Web site (always 2 words)
Web page
Web server
Web browser
webmaster (one word, lower-cased: has evolved to mean a gender-neutral
job title).
I've noticed several common grammatical errors in E-Mail messages lately.
In the hope that it will help others avoid them, I humbly offer the following
guidelines:
- Don't use no double negatives.
- Make sure each pronoun agree with their antecedent.
- Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
- Verbs has to agree with their subject.
- Don't use commas, which are not necessary.
- Try to not split infinitives.
- Its important to use apostrophe's correctly.
- Proofread your writing to see if any word is out.
- Correct spelling is esential. Unknown
- For example, this sentance has threee errors.
How many internet mail list subscribers does it take to change a light
bulb?
1,331:
- 1 to change the light bulb and to post to the mail list that
the light bulb has been changed.
- 14 to share similar experiences of changing light bulbs and
how the light bulb could have been changed differently.
- 7 to caution about the dangers of changing light bulbs.
- 27 to point out spelling/grammar errors in posts about changing
light bulbs.
- 53 to flame the spell checkers.
- 156 to write to the list administrator complaining about the
light bulb discussion and its inappropriateness to this mail list.
- 41 to correct spelling in the spelling/grammar flames.
- 109 to post that this list is not about light bulbs and to please
take this email exchange to alt.lite.bulb
- 203 to demand that cross posting to alt.grammar, alt.spelling
and alt.punctuation about changing light bulbs be stopped.
- 111 to defend the posting to this list saying that we all use
light bulbs and therefore the posts **are** relevant to this mail list.
- 306 to debate which method of changing light bulbs is superior,
where to buy the best light bulbs, what brand of light bulbs work best
for this technique, and what brands are faulty.
- 27 to post URLs where one can see examples of different light
bulbs.
- 14 to post that the URLs were posted incorrectly, and to post
corrected URLs.
- 3 to post about links they found from the URLs that are relevant
to this list which makes light bulbs relevant to this list.
- 33 to concatenate all posts to date, then quote them including
all headers and footers, and then add "Me Too."
- 12 to post to the list that they are unsubscribing because they
cannot handle the light bulb controversey.
- 19 to quote the "Me Too's" to say, "Me Three."
- 4 to suggest that posters request the light bulb FAQ.
- 1 to propose new alt.change.lite.bulb newsgroup.
- 47 to say this is just what alt.physic.cold_fusion was meant
for; leave it here.
- 143 votes for alt.lite.bulb. SienerthKD@vax.vmi.edu
Go to the top of the page, or
return to my home page?
Here is a cautionary tale about us called The
Castaways.
Here is a link to an excellent analysis of Computer
Aided Instruction (CAI) by Bruce Toback.
And another to The Modern Raven by Epson
Apple Poe ("Abort, Retry, Ignore").
If you want to see if you are infected with The Gullibility Virus, check
here.
For a press release about IBM's new nutcracker, see
here.
Finally, a list of quotations about technology
from the visionaries of their time.
What gender are computers? Here are some suggestions
from Ann Landers:
Men think computers should be referred to as females, just like ships,
because:
- No one but the Creator understands their internal logic.
- The language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible
to everyone else.
- The message "Bad command or file name" is about as informative
as "If you don't know why I'm mad at you, I'm certainly not going
to tell you."
- Your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.
- As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending
half your paycheck on accessories for it.
Women think computers should be referred to as male. Here's why:
- They have a lot of data, but they are still clueless.
- They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half of the time,
they ARE the problem.
- As soon as you commit to one, you realize if you had waited a little
longer, you could have obtained a better model.
- In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.
- A big power surge will knock them out for the rest of the night. Creators
Syndicate
How did the chicken cross the road?
- NT Chicken: Will cross the road in June. No, August. September for
sure.
- OS/2 Chicken: It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so
quiet that nobody noticed.
- Win 95 Chicken: You see different colored feathers while it crosses,
but cook it and it still tastes like ... chicken.
- Microsoft Chicken (TM): It's already on both sides of the road. And
it just bought the road.
- OOP Chicken: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message.
- Assembler Chicken: First it builds the road ...
- C Chicken: It crosses the road without looking both ways.
- C++ Chicken: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you'd simply
refer to him on the other side.
- VB Chicken: USHighways!TheRoad.cross (aChicken)
- Delphi Chicken: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped
on the other side.
- Java Chicken: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, the server
will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets)
- Web Chicken: Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on
running.
- Gopher Chicken: Tried to run, but got flattened by the Web chicken.
- Newton Chicken: Can't cluck, can't fly, and can't lay eggs, but you
can carry it across the road in your pocket!
- Cray Chicken: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't
dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side fully cooked.
- Quantum Logic Chicken: The chicken is distributed probabalistically
on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your course.
- Lotus Chicken: Don't you *dare* try to cross the road the same way
we do!
- Mac Chicken: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross
the road, so there's no way to tell it to.
- Al Gore Chicken: Waiting for completion of NCI (National Chicken-crossing
Infrastructure) and will cross as soon as it's finished, assuming he's
re-elected and the Republicans don't gut the program.
- COBOL Chicken: 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING.
- IF NO-MORE-VEHICLES THEN
- PERFORM 0010-CROSS-THE-ROAD
- VARYING STEPS FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL
- ELSE
- GO TO 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING by WillMcN
Bizarre Computer Viruses
Paul Revere Virus ~ This revolutionary virus does not horse around.
It warns you of impending hard drive attack... once if by LAN, twice if
by C:.
Politically Correct Virus ~ Never calls itself a virus, but instead
refers to itself as an "electronic microorganism".
Arnold Schwarzenegger Virus ~ Terminates all your files, but stays resident...
It'll be back.
Government Economist Virus ~ Nothing works, but all your diagnostic
software says everything is fine.
Federal Bureaucrat Virus ~ Divides your hard disk into hundreds of little
units, each of which does practically nothing, but all of which claim to
be the most important part of your computer.
Gallup Virus ~ 60% of the computers infected will lose 38% of their
data 14% of the time (plus or minus a 3.5% margin of error).
Congressional Virus ~ The computer locks up and the screen splits erratically
with a message appearing on each half, blaming the other side for the problem.
PBS Virus ~ Your programs stop every few minutes asking for money.
Star Trek Virus ~ Invades your system where no other virus has gone
before.
Health Care Virus ~ Tests your most recent system upgrade for quirks
and conflicts, finds nothing wrong, and then sends you a bill for $4500.
Go to the top of the page,
or return to my home page?
If you have questions or comments, write the:
Author of this page: Terry
Helser - helsertl@oneonta.edu
Web Coordinator: Steve
Maniscalco - maniscsj@oneonta.edu
Or return to the SUNY @ Oneonta Home
Page to see where we live and work.
Last Modified on 7/9/98
![Made with MacOS](file:///Samwise/%20Word%20Perfect%20Files/web%20stuff/macos_mov.gif)