To Hell with Bill Gates

Tony Deyal

TO GET into Heaven, you have to pass through the Pearly Gates. For aeons, the gates of Hell remained nameless. Now, however, the days of anonymity are gone forever. The unfortunate, though frequent, entrant into the nether regions is confronted by the Bill Gates.

It seems that after a fatal car accident, Bill Gates found himself in purgatory with St. Peter, who was trying to determine Gates' final destination. St. Peter confessed, "Bill, I'm really not quite sure where to put you. I'm going to do something in your case that I've never done before. I'm going to let you decide where you want to go." Bill decided to try Hell first.

It was a beautiful, clean, sandy beach with clear waters and lots of bikini-clad women running around. Bill was very pleased. "This is fantastic," he told St. Peter. "If this is Hell, I really want to see Heaven!" "Fine," said St. Peter, and off they went.

Heaven was a place high in the clouds, with angels drifting about, playing harps and singing. It was nice, but not as enchanting or as enticing as Hell. Bill thought for a quick minute, and rendered his decision. "I prefer to go to Hell," he told St. Peter. So Bill Gates went to Hell.

Two weeks later, St. Peter decided to check on the late billionaire to see how he was doing in Hell. When he got there, he found Bill, shackled to a wall, screaming, while being burned and tortured by demons.

"How's it going?" he asked Bill. Bill responded, his voice filled with anguish and disappointment, "This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited with you. What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches and all the babes?"

"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.

Like most other very successful business-persons, Bill Gates has his enemies who would love to see him anyplace but at the helm of Microsoft. There are also people who, fed up with the frequent computer crashes that seem to virtually characterise the "Windows" operating system that Gates founded, would love to see him burn. However, Bill Gates is very much alive and getting richer every minute. The new operating system he launched recently, Windows XP, which is supposedly crash-proof, is the new jewel in his crown. It would also put him beyond the reach and derision of the car-makers.

It is said that Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry. He said that if automobile technology had kept pace with computer technology over the last few decades we would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8 car, and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour.

Or you could have an economy car that weighed 30 pounds and got a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case the price of a new car would be less than US$50.

The motor-car industry through General Motors (GM) is reputed to have responded by saying that had automobile technology developed like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars which, for no reason whatsoever, would crash twice a day.

XP is supposed to change all that. Even so, it is important to consider how far we have come because of Gates and the other pioneers of computer technology. I found this poem that says it all. It is called Life before the computer.

An application was for employment

A programme was a TV show

A cursor used profanity

A keyboard was a piano!

Memory was something

that you lost with age

A CD was a bank account.

And if you had a 3 1/2 inch floppy,

You hoped nobody found out!

Compress was something you did to garbage

Not something you did to a file

And if you unzipped anything in public

You'd be in jail for awhile!

Log on was adding wood to a fire

Hard drive was a long trip on the road

A mouse pad was where a mouse lived

And a backup happened to your commode!

Cut ­ you did with a pocket knife

Paste you did with glue

A web was a spider's home

And a virus was the flu!

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper

And the memory in my head

I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash

But when it happens they wish they were dead!

Tony Deyal was last seen saying if you think you are computer illiterate, here's someone worse off than you. A Dell technician received a call from a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was "bad and an invalid". The technician had to explain that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.

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