It is a little-known fact that Jerome K. Jerome's comic masterpiece "Three men in a boat" (to say nothing of the dog!) was originally designed as a satire on computing. The three men (George, Harris and 'I'), feel that they are suffering from every known bug and virus, and decide that a trip to the User Area will cure them. The original version of the text has long since disappeared, but parts of it can be reconstructed from the following fragments, which are all that remain:
"Harris always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger. You never saw such a commotion in the Phoenix building in all your life, as when Uncle Podger undertook to modify a program. The users would say 'can someone take a look at MAIL?' and Uncle Podger would say: 'Oh leave that to me. I'll have it done in no time.'
Then he would sit down and begin. He would send a secretary out to buy some floppy discs, and another one after her to say what colour ones he needed. Then he'd ask someone where the wishlist had got to, and storm up and down the Phoenix building asking who had taken it.
Eventually he'd discover the wishlist in his pocket and would try and sit down at his terminal. However that day someone had taken all the chairs away without telling anyone, and so my Uncle Podger generally found himself sprawling on the floor with his head in the waste-paper basket. He'd stagger to the Vunderpac for a drink to steady his nerves, after which he would naturally find that he needed another drink to take away the taste of the first one.
Then Uncle Podger would lose the wishlist again.
The wishlist would turn up at last, but by this time his terminal had broken down. Eventually he'd go to the User Area and start typing things in, but the program would crash at the wrong moment and my Uncle Podger would lose everything. So he'd blame it on hackers and viruses and spend hours trying to write a counter-virus. He would give up on this eventually, once his counter-virus program had hung up the system completely and the other users started protesting.
Uncle David would mildly observe that the next time Uncle Podger was going to write some software, he hoped he'd tell him in good time, so that he could arrange to be at an important conference while it was being done.
Eventually, my Uncle Podger would somehow succeed in getting some minor facility to work properly. His whole office would be a disaster, with paper, discs and coffee cups everywhere. 'There you are,' he would say, surveying the wreckage with evident pride. 'Why, some people would have bought a commercial package!' Then he'd log off, and lose the file again."
"Harris asked me if I'd ever been in the Phoenix maze. He said that he had once been in to show a friend round it. He had read it up in SPEC.PHX3, and it was so simple that nothing could go wrong. He said: 'We'll just write a simple command sequence so you can see how the logical flow works after an error, and then we may as well go and get some coffee.'
Shortly after they had started, they met some other users, who admitted that they had been trying for several weeks to discover how Return Codes and Errlabels worked. Harris told them that they could watch him, if they liked; he had a copy of the documentation and it was child's play to understand.
Harris's program kept jumping from label to label but it never seemed to get anywhere, and his cousin said he supposed that the logical flow was very sophisticated.
'Oh, one of the most subtle imaginable,' said Harris.
'It must be,' replied the cousin, 'because we've had this screenful of output at least four times already.'
'Oh, impossible,' said Harris, but a young lady watching nearby said she was sure of it because she'd always wondered what that particular error message meant, and Harris had got it four times in the last ten minutes. She also said that Harris was a fraud, wasting her time when she had a project to do.
About ten more minutes passed, when suddenly the program stopped dead. Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what it was supposed to do, but the crowd was looking dangerous, and he decided to go and ask the Adviser about it.
It was Wednesday morning, as luck would have it, and there was an Adviser on who was new to the game. He gave Harris an example sheet to read but then Harris found that he couldn't get anything at all to work, and the command sequence regularly stopped after half a second. They had to wait till one of the old Advisers came back from lunch before they got it going again.
Harris said that Phoenix was a very fine command language, as far as he could judge; and we agreed that we would get George to have a go at it later."
"I once assisted at a very curious incident, which, as it throws much light upon the inner mental working of human nature in general, ought, I think, to be recorded here.
I was encouraged to attend a User Representatives' meeting, at which the EAGLE scheduler was to be discussed. A learned Doctor, whose name I didn't catch, stood up and said he was going to recite INFO.EAGLE.CURRENT.STATUS to us. In those days I was very impressionable, and I believed two students who told me that the scheduler was 'by and large, adequate,' and that the good Doctor was going to portray its faults in a comic light.
The Doctor began his recitation. It was a weird, soulful story, all about the frustration of a man's hopes by Fate, and the Doctor made our flesh creep as he groaned his way through the tale.
I don't know much about computing myself, but I did not want the other users there to guess my ignorance, so I hit upon what seemed like a good idea. I kept my eye on the students, and whenever they smiled, I roared with laughter. Occasionally I threw in a few guffaws myself, as if I had seen a bit of humour in the report that had escaped the others.
I noticed, as the recitation progressed, that a good many other users were also watching the two students, and doing as I did. Since the students were smiling and giggling pretty well throughout the recital, it went down extremely well.
And yet the learned Doctor remained so very solemn. As we laughed, the expression on his face changed from gravity to surprise, as if hilarity were the very last thing he had intended. Having spoken of a 'fundamentally incorrect algorithm' he buried his head in his hands and sobbed wordlessly. As can be imagined, our roars at this stroke of genius nearly brought the house down.
He finished amid hoots of laughter. We said it was the funniest thing we'd heard since COBOL, and how anyone could say that CS staff didn't have a sense of humour, we didn't know. Then the great Doctor got up and swore at us for ten minutes without repeating himself. He said that the story was true, and not intended to be comic at all. He'd given his life to the EAGLE scheduler, and it had let him down.
It was a trying situation, and there seemed to be no answer to him. We looked for the two students who has misled us, but they had vanished immediately after the end of the recitation. Of course that was the end of that URC meeting. I never saw a crowd dissolve so quickly, except on the occasion when a tanker of Vundercoke exploded in Trafalgar Square."
Jonathan Partington, November 1989