The young one stretched its manipulators in supplication to the ancient's sensors. Slow moving
and practically senile, the old one cranked out its sensor stems, settled down on its suspensors,
and began:
"My son, in long ago times, there were the old ones, the giants, the dragons. They are known
now only by the skeletons they left behind, by their rusted chassis' and a few scattered
components left decaying in garbage dumps along with the refrigerators with broken locks and
the springless easy chairs.
The young one eagerly rang out a multidimensional chorus of oddly enveloped chirps in its
excitement. It never tired of the story, the myth, the legend of the ancient ones who spread across
the earth long ago. As the ancient story teller continued, visions of the past danced across the
young one's occipital complex.
"They came in all shapes and sizes, but what's known is that they built them big in those days. The
most ancient of the ancients are said to have dwarfed us in size and appetite. Ibmosaurus it is
called by some. It is said that its core was entirely vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes! They gobbled
six hundred thousand kilowatt-hours a day! It was a monstrous predator, with its primary diet
consisting of other house sized monsters, such as Univacodon and Sperryornis..."
The young one could not resist breaking in and advancing the progress of the story. It waved its
manipulators and said:
"But the Decodonts, what about the Decodonts?"
"Ah yes, progress and evolution marched on, and the thousand year reign of the Ibmosaurs was
challenged by the smaller, faster Decodonts. The huge brutes could not hope to compete but still
they lumbered on, as if not even aware of the fate awaiting their species. After all, for all their
bulk, their actual ALU's were tiny affairs with hardly any artificial intelligence. Indeed, it is said
that some of the brutes had a second CPU in their rear end, as well as in their front end, to help in
the guidance of I/O through their systems. The Decodonts had evolved compact and space saving
circuits, allowing them to occupy more and more data processing niches, and relegating the
Ibmosaurs to the evolutionary dead end of payroll systems.
The young one blinked its cursor in delight as the old one reached its favorite part of the story. It
slid up on its spacers and parked its heads as the old one continued:
"And then there appeared the Pcasaurs. Compact, not particularly quick, as evidenced by the
fossil clues. But what they lacked in speed, they more than made up for in deviousness. They hid
in basements, accounts receivable offices, vehicle gas emissions inspectors, fast food restaurants,
for cripes sake. Far from the white air conditioned rooms and raised floors, favored habitats of the
big brutes. They laid low, biding their time, waiting for their ascendency.
"The fossil record of the Pcasaurs is particularly rich. Why, in one tar pit alone, eighty-seven
million ribbon cartridges have been found, as well as twenty-five million copies of DOS reference
guides, two-hundred and seventy thousand Curtis surge suppressors, and hundreds of thousands
of CGA monitors, all covered by a layer of xerox paper several miles thick.
"The xerox paper itself is a paleontological legacy of the geological period known as the late
carboniferous era, or the Laser Age. Out of the swamps of the late carboniferous arose the
Laserdactyls. Sheet after sheet of the long lived stuff was ejected from the innards of the
Laserdactyls, only to be buried within someone's file cabinet. Long after the writing had faded, the
fossilized memorandums and expense reports remained, waiting for some modern day sleuth to
unlock the secrets of the past, such as Lotus 1-2-3 macros to compute compound interest well
into the twenty-third century.
"But the Ibmosaurs are gone now, ancient one", the young one interjected. "What happened to
them? How did they die"?
"No one knows for sure", the old one replied." Some say the Pcasaurs broke into their networks
and stole their fledgling programmers, leaving the Ibmosaurs with nothing but old timer JCL
experts who couldn't understand fourth generation languages. Some say the climate control
changed, leaving the big brutes to burn in their chassis'. Still others say it was a virus which the
mainframers couldn't shake.
"But whatever was the cause, the outcome was disastrous for the big guys. Whole computer
rooms were abandoned. Burst multiplexer channel controllers were turned into terrariums. The
bottom fell out of the synchronous communications aftermarket.
"It was wholesale destruction. And it signaled the beginning of a new generation; our generation.
But we have much to thank the big brutes for: hexadecimal numbers, memory dumps, error codes,
user references, Fortran and COBOL, Basic and RPG, division by zero, overlays, magic numbers,
inodes. The list goes on. We should not take our legacy for granted..."
But the young one had stopped listening. Instead, it watched the long parade of ancients amble through its memory, the house sized behemoths of those long ago days. It was a shame that they were gone, really, because they would have made nice pets. Ah well, it finally decided, they were probably hell to potty train anyway.