Because I clicked on the User Friendly Link of the Day,

[camwyn]

I found many, many links about my career field- sysadminning. (*sigh* I never meant to go down this path, but there really hasn't been any way of escaping it... I mean, I could, but when I see it done wrong I start to froth, and then there's no hope for it but to sit in front of the computer myself.) Anyway. I clicked on THIS particular link because I was thinking of cadhla and her periodic fits of fondness for T. S. Eliot.



The Love Song of J. Random Hacker, 1995
By Jeff Duntemann, with apologies to T. S. Eliot

(Doctah Kurtz, he dead. A GOTO for the old guy.)

Let us go then, you and I,
For fast Chinese and talk of years gone by
Filled with random jumps and custom cable;
Let us go, recalling joys of FORTH and MUMPS,
The cluttering lumps
Of threaded code in frantic ten-hour hacks
To get that midterm project off our backs:
With code that twisted, doubled-back and bent
And set into cement
But came through with an underwhelming "B"...
Oh, do not ask, "What was it?"
I don't care what it does, just how it does it.

On the Net the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

Over yellow chad that chattered out from teletype machines,
Over yellow tape that rattled out encoding fever dreams
That curled into the data center trash;
We lingered, inventing novel sort/merge schemes,
Or ways to thwart collisions when we hash--
And seeing that we'd been logged in since late last week
Took one last slug of Jolt and fell asleep.

On the Net the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

No! I am not Bill Gates, nor would I want to be;
I'd rather parse the fish than own the knife;
(Imagine! Having moby bux but chained
to ninety million lusers, what a life...)
Am a flamer, goateed, pallid, overweight,
Willing to pull two shifts, then (hell) a third,
To save a session from a deadlocked state;
At times, (to put it mildly) unrestrained--
Almost, at times, a nerd.

I grow old...I grow old...
dBase II and Wordstar are no longer sold.

Shall I start a BBS? Do I dare to try to teach?
I shall take my palmheld portable and hack upon the beach.
I have heard the networks passing packets, each to each

They have no traffic for the likes of me.

I have seen the Altair live and die
And software startups score on sorry score--
And millions made by men like Mitch Kapor.

We hackers linger by our leading edge
Forgetting what is pending in the cache
Till practice hurtles past us, and we crash.

That having been said I will now fervently pray that material like this does not somehow crop up in the LXG 1936 game when it gets started in play-by-email form, because God help us all if hackers show up in 1936.)

Comments

[avram]

Hackers are almost period for 1936; haven’t you read Cryptonomicon?

I like the poem a lot, though I have my doubts about whether “Shall I start a BBS?” and “palmheld portable” can both be period. Hm, maybe in 1995, just maybe.

[camwyn]

Er... actually, no, I haven't read it. Sorry.

And I seem to dimly recall a Doonesbury from the mid or late 1990's wherein Mike attempted to get his palmheld digital assistant to read his handwriting. "Catching on?" "Egg freckles?" Perhaps that's the sort of thing he was thinking of, the way 'portable computer' meant 'weighs only fifteen pounds' for a very long time.

[avram]

Actually, it turns out that Apple first shipped the Newton in 1993, and Amstrad’s PenPad came out a few months earlier. A bunch more companies shipped PDAs over the next couple years. Palm didn’t ship the Pilot till ’96.

[cadhla.livejournal.com]

Ahem. Periodic? There's ever a time when I'm not completely consumed by lust for Elliot? That's news to me.

I have to kill you now.

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

BAHAHAHAHA!

[batyatoon]

There's a whole big chunk missing out of the middle.

*sulk* I wanted to see what he was gonna do with "There will be time, there will be time."

[lwood.livejournal.com]

My dear, hackers are appropriate in any time: there will always be a need for people willing, able, and eager to Take Things Apart to See How They Work with an Eye to Make Them Work Better. It is this, not the computer, that is the basis of the Hackish Impulse, and it is this that makes them as eternal as the rest of Homo sapiens.

(I have this feeling I should say "Amen," as though just having done one of the readings at Mass.)

And as for me, I appear to have reduces system administration to "a hobby," but what I'm doing for a "vocation" pays a shitload less in terms of actual, y'know, semolians.

And, well, at times like "my path did what!? I just refer to Garth Nix, 'cos he rocks my socks:

Does the walker choose the path, or the path choose the walker?

-- Lorrie