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The following was really written by my father, who has only been involved
with computers (and PCs, at that) for a couple of years. I was pretty
impressed (as you can tell :-) ).

			POME FOR RUTH'S BIRTHDAY

(Being her Father's last Venture into the Higher Realms of Literature)

There's a brand new Sun computer to the south of Albuquerq,
It's supposed to be a miracle machine,
But a broken-hearted woman wonders why it doesn't werq.
It's the stupidest damn thing she's ever seen.

The processor won't process, the stations will not Sparc,
The circuit boards leak bits and bytes galore.
When she opened up a panel to inspect the micro-channel
All the sub-routines fell out upon the floor.

There's no way to access RAM, it's shut tighter than a clam,
The disk drive motors stripped their gears and died.
To get BIOS out of ROM she'd need a thermonuclear bomb,
It's the kind of thing that really hurts her pride.

She feels intense frustration in this dismal situation,
What to do about the mess she cannot say.
Every time she presses Enter the Operations Centre
Collapses into total disarray.

No cybernetic cunning can get it up and running,
The interface is deaf to all her pleas.
Now the field-effect transistors have broken out in blisters
Like a symptom of some terminal disease.

The cause of all her trouble comes from far beyond the Hubble,
Where other Suns are also in decline,
And a slowly freezing Frooz seeking somewhere warm to snooze
Decided that Socorro would do fine.

It crossed the interstellar void aboard a vagrant asteroid
But lost its grip while miles above the town. 
To avert annihilation, it merged with background radiation,
The Very Large Array then beamed it down!

Entangled in computer tape this Frooz was almost going ape
But when it landed at the AOC,
It fled the ferrous oxide trap through a playback head's magnetic gap
To set up house where nobody could see.

There's a simple, sure solution to this out-of-space pollution,
-- a multi-disk-drive striping trick called R.A.I.D.*
If Ruth Milner used this ruse she could eliminate the Frooz
'Cos R.A.I.D. -- kills -- alien -- bugs -- dead!

* Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, according to an article 
in BYTE magazine. I understood every word, of course.

Love, Dad x x x 

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