COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY:

COMPUTER: Instrument of torture. The first computer was invented by Roger
"Duffy" Billingsly, a British scientist. In a plot to overthrow Hitler, Duffy disguised
himself as a German ally and offered his invention as a gift to the dictator. The plot
worked. On April 8, 1945, Hitler became so enraged at the "Incompatible File
Format" error message that he shot himself. The war ended soon after Hitler's
death, and Duffy began working for IBM.

DEFAULT DIRECTORY: Black Hole. Default directory is where all the files that
you need disappear.

ERROR MESSAGE: Terse, baffling remark used by programmers to place blame
on users for their program's shortcomings.

HELP: The feature that assists in generating more questions. When the Help
feature is used correctly, users are able to navigate through a series of Help
screens and end up where they started from without learning a darn thing.

INPUT/OUTPUT: Information is "input" from the keyboard as intelligible data and
"output" to the printer as unrecognizable crud.

PRINTER: A joke in poor taste. A printer consists of three main parts:

          the case
          the jammed paper tray, and
          the blinking red light.

PROGRAMMERS: Computer avengers. Once members of that group of high school
nerds who wore tape on their glasses, played Dungeons and Dragons and memorized "Star
Trek" episodes; now millionaires who create "user friendly" software to get revenge on
whoever gave them noogies.

SCHEDULED RELEASE DATE: A carefully calculated date determined by estimating
the actual shipping date and subtracting six months from it.

USERS: Collective term for those who stare blankly at a monitor. Users are divided into
three types: novice, intermediate and expert. Novice users are those who are afraid that
simply pressing a key might break their computer. Intermediate users are those who don't
know how to fix their computer after they've just pressed a key that broke it. And expert
users are those who break other people's computers.