Folklore either about computers and those who use them, or folklore that circulates among those who use computers, especially by means of the technology or based upon specific features of the technology. Computer folklore is not yet well documented. Folklore about computers dates back to the late 1940s, with the exoteric perspective representing computers as more than human, sometimes literally divine, as this example illustrates: IBM had just installed its newest computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a number of campus notables gathered for its unveiling. Members of the group were requested to submit questions that they thought would test the huge machine. An astronomer submitted a question about the size of the universe, and a physicist asked the number of black holes in the universe. Both seemed satisfied with the answers given. Finally, a philosopher asked the ultimate question: “Is there a God?” The computer operators fed this question to the computer, and after several minutes of computation, the computer printed out its answer: “There is now!” A variant of the omniscient-computer joke begins the same way, but the third persons father had died recently, and so he asked where his father was. To this the computer did not answer “in heaven” or “in hell” as expected, but rather “in Wisconsin.” When the third person provided the information that his father had died three days earlier, the computer’s immediate reply was: “The man who married your mother died three days ago. Your father is fishing in Wisconsin.” (The same joke, however, circulated many years ago about a fortune-telling scale.) In the 1950s and early 1960s, early attempts at computer translation were hugely unsuccessful, presumably resulting in computer-translation project? The computer translated “out such computer-as-idiot jokes as this: Did you hear about the of sight, out of mind” into “invisible idiot!” The exoteric view of computers remains bifurcated, with computers either supremely able or inhumanly stupid, demanding payment of debts of $00.00 or converting change for an $8.39 breakfast to $83,900.00 Such accounts seem to be on the wane due to the improvement of the technology and the increase in the popular understanding of how computers operate. Those who work with computers have an insider’s perspective that does not tolerate apocryphal tales about the machines’ capabilities. “Garbage in, garbage out” (or GIGO), rarely heard today, reflects insiders’ shifting the onus for computer failure onto data-entry operators and, perhaps less commonly, onto programmers. Nonetheless, those inside the technology long told stories about larger-than-life exploits of individuals, whether, in the era of mainframe computing, about individuals who had a cot at the local computing center so that they could work all night or, with the advent of interactive computing, about all-night “hacking.” These stories, which may be contrasted with the omniscient computer, were almost always accurate in technical details. Nearly everyone knows the account of the founding of Apple Computer, and the later success of Microsoft’s Bill Gates is told, and reported in newspapers, with the same larger-thanlife rhetoric of hero legends. Conversely, there is a traditional demonizing rhetoric—for example, about contemporary hackers who threaten national security—just as there was, and remains, a rhetoric about computer viruses and their authors. One way of oudining a history of computer folklore is to consider the development of various aspects of the technology, because printers and other “output devices” have often been put to “folk” uses, much as office photocopy machines have been used to reproduce the traditional items called Xeroxlore or photocopylore. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the computer printouts that festooned the walls of many system analysts’ offices were, in their complexity, markers of technical expertise and, through their use of exotic devices such as color printers, markers of access to those devices. Less-expert programmers had to settle for simple nudes and comic characters, such as the ubiquitous representations of the cartoon dog Snoopy. Interest in traditional graphic images, even simple ones, continues. The accompanying “Kilroy” and “Granny” graphic come from the signature blocks of computer users’ electronic mail messages: Indeed, even Xeroxlore is circulated widely on the Internet, the most accessible being texts that are easily represented by strings of alphanumerics. “The Complete Set of Blonde Jokes” (more than 400 jokes comprise the file) begins: Q: What do you call a blonde with half a brain?
A: Gifted! The following item, titled “WHY ASK WHY?” contains a lengthy series of seeming paradoxes and contradictions, beginning: Why do you need a driver’s license to buy liquor when you can’t drink and drive? Why isn’t phonetic spelled the way it sounds? Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? But computer folklore is more than jokes, tales, and Xeroxlore adapted to a new medium. In the late 1970s, a computer game, “Adventure,” was developed as a project in artifical intelligence. It was quickly appropriated by experienced computer programmers across the country for their own recreational use. Other computer games proliferated, and eventually many of them, including “Adventure,” were commodified for popular consumption. Computer “viruses” were developed in the context of artificial intelligence in the early 1970s at MIT and elsewhere. Innocent enough in an environment of stand-alone computers, these programs proved highly destructive on networked computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much computer folklore reveals the extent to which the transmitters of that folklore are elite computer users, with access to increasingly sophisticated technology. Considered over time, technical computer folklore has “trickled down,” with massive imitation of the original few programs. Computer folklore—whether traditional items such as chain letters or computer games and viruses—that is copied and communicated by this means poses many difficulties to the industry. Computer viruses, of course, may be understood as direct threats, but computer games and even chain letters may consume so much time and space that they are treated as similar threats to the efficient operating of computer networks. Like the “little moron” jokes that were so popular during World War II that they interfered with the wartime production at many factories, the popularity of computer folklore also results in its proscription in many workplaces. Michael J.Preston
References
Dorst, John. 1990. Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age. Journal of the Folklore Institute 27:179–190. Jennings, Karla. 1990. The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age. New York: W.W.Norton.