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 key that broke it. And expert users are those who break other people's computers.



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