Chapter Sixteen: The Coffin Solution

Margaret was no longer my boss.

This did not sit well with her. Nor did my working at home instead of in her living room. Her thumb had grown accustomed to my face.

Teresa had bought me my own computer for a wedding present, from the proceeds of the sale of her house. She and I and the Tweeds had all moved to Sebastopol, a small burg twelve miles west of Santa Rosa. I was back in Sonoma County again.

There was not enough work in Nevada City. None of us wanted to live in the big city, like San Francisco or Sacramento or Oakland. Sebastopol was the compromise. Small country town, an hour from all the cities.

I was now a contract programmer and not an employee. I didn’t work by the hour. I worked by the job. Art wasn’t thrilled with this development. It made us equals. He owned him and I owned me. He had always been careful to treat me like an equal and left it up to Margaret to provide the pointed hints to the contrary. Now that equality was fact, however, the wind had gone out of his exuberant leadership. There was no one to lead.

Revenues had tripled, however.

In a stunningly short time, the typing had disappeared from typesetting. The typing was now done by the authors and located on computer disks. With files created by WordPerfect, Wang, Microsoft Word, Displaywrite, Multimate, PFS, PC-Write, Volkswriter, XyWrite, Samna, OfficeWriter, WordStar, DCA/RFT, EasyWriter, Spellbinder, IslandWrite, SunWrite. Word Processors they were called. New companies sprang up monthly to grab a piece of the pie. It was like some kind of gold rush.

These files all looked like words on the computer screen and on the paper from the printer. However, underneath, stored on the disk, they were all vastly different.

The files were full of entities called bytes. There were 256 possible values any one particular byte could have. This was referred to as the ASCII chart. American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Very sexy stuff.

At first, I had a lot of trouble visualizing these microscopic byte things. It sounded like bacteria squirming around on the surface of the floppy disk. The image probably came from the computer lingo that referred to programmer mistakes as bugs. It made me want to wash my hands after handling one of the disks.

Then I had an idea that worked for me. It was a real Bingo moment. Something else might work for somebody else.

Anyway, I started imagining these bytes like they were each a teensy tiny coffin. Very small. Lived next door to the Molecule family. Each of these coffins had eight levers on the side like slot machine arms. The floppy disk was like a huge graveyard where all these byte coffins were buried.

A programmer was like a grave digger, down there exhuming remains or stuffing them in. You had to sign up for a particular type of programming Union to get a license to get in the graveyard and exhume or stuff.

One was COBOL, Common Business Oriented Language. Obviously, not very sexy. It was used mainly by businesses and produced the stuff you see on the bank teller’s screen when she tells you there’s no money in your account.

Another was FORTRAN, for Formula Translating System. It was as old as Milton Berle, and was used primarily by severe Math heads and scientific geeks and was definitely not for use in normal society.

A third was Pascal. This one was named after Blaise Pascal, a famous mathematician and philosopher. It was for classrooms that taught you how to do structured programming, instead of wild slopping shovels and dirt every which way programming, so you could graduate into the difficult geek languages later on.

Still another was BASIC. Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. You can tell who this baby was for. Ordinary idiots who flunked math but did well in home making and PE. It was for household programs that reminded you to keep dentist appointments. It was one of the primary unstructured type of programming languages that Pascal could teach you how not to do. Trying to get a clue from somebody’s BASIC programming code was like running around in the graveyard dressed in a chicken suit with your head cut off.

And then there was C. Just plain old C. As the name implies, it was a bare bones type of language that didn’t gab around with a lot of words when a simple letter would suffice just as well. It was developed in the 70’s for Unix computers and spread like wildfire through the computer world. It took up a lot less space to get the job done and was great for writing System Software.

Like good old DOS.

If you didn’t pull any of the coffin levers, the lid stayed closed and that meant the byte was named Zero, like nobody was buried there. If you pulled all eight levers, the lid popped up and there was somebody named Two Hundred and Fifty-five laying in there. Smiling of course. These bytes were born to be user friendly. They were robots, essentially, and who would buy a robot who frowned? Two hundred and fifty-five was as crowded as the coffin could get. With the zero, of course, being a two hundred and fifty-sixth type of byte of nothingness. The Unknown Soldier of bytesville.

If you pulled one lever down and not the others, the lid popped up and a Mr. One was in there eating an apple or something. If you pulled only the second lever, and not the first or any of the others, Mrs. Two would be in there. If you pulled the first and second, but none of the others, Mr. Three would smile up at you.

The odd stiffs were males and the even stiffs were females, even though they were both really robots. This gender orientation had been agreed to at a top level conference of very strange people who had formerly just been Dorks, but were now ostentatiously called Nerds. Since Nerds were by definition neuter entities, they insisted on injecting SEX into their work even if it was ridiculous to people who actually had sex. It was best not to interrogate Nerds about their reasons. You could get Nerd juice on your clothes and become impotent.

This Nerd agreement about bytes having SEX was reached only after a long duke out, though, which the Nerds felt was necessary to simulate a marital dispute. They were of the misguided opinion that these marital disputes were a foreplay thing before the actual consumption of SEX. Since they had never been on dates, they had no personal experience that sex rarely involved fighting, especially when both people were very hungry like often happened on dates.

At any rate, for this reason, I never asked the coffin dwellers what they did there in the dark, waiting for their lid to open. It seemed impolite.

Believe it or not, all the combinations of the eight levers up or down could turn out two hundred and fifty-five different coffin stiffs, plus the zero for empty. Two hundred and fifty-six. You had to get a pencil and a long sheet of paper, or take math, to convince yourself this one stinking little byte could have so many personalities.

Then the possibilities got really hairy in a hurry. Some smart-ass programmers started welding two coffins together to get one amalgamated stiff. This stiff could have sixty-five thousand five-hundred and thirty-six different identities, not just two hundred and fifty-six. Not to be outdone, other smart-ass programmers welded three coffins and produced a stiff swelled all the way up to sixteen million seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand two hundred and sixteen. That’s 16,777,216.

You don’t want to know what the smart-ass number for four welded coffins was. It was too frightening to think about. Plus it wouldn’t fit on your calculator display if you tried to get mathematical about it. You’d only get some wild ass calculator display full of numbers followed by an E. The E stood for Error or Egads, I was never sure which. Somehow, this was supposed to be helpful knowledge.

It didn’t stop the smart-ass programmers from doing it, though. In fact, eight welded coffins were no big deal anymore. Hell, sixteen even. The sky was the limit. And it was. We’re talking stars and galaxies and grains of sand on the world’s beaches numbers. Angels on the head of a pin.

All in multiples of eight, for some reason I never understood. Why not ten, which was a lot easier to do math with? When I pointed this out to a really, really severe math infested Nerdolino, however, I witnessed my first experience of a person actually laughing himself to death.

Each of the coffin dwellers, the bytes, had – you guessed it – eight legs. These legs were called Bits. You could yank them on or off like the coffin levers to create mutated entities called Byte Manipulations. When you manipulated the bytes you did it by employing Bitwise Algorithms.

You had to have really small hands to get in there and manipulate, though. And a certain kind of twisted, partially depraved outlook on life, which Nerds seemed to enjoy having. It really made their eyes glow and their eyebrows frizz out all over the place. If you had hair in your ears that could frizz out too, you were considered a top echelon Nerd. These top echeloners had usually been born with abundant Nerd genes and didn’t have to learn Nerdness from scratch like I was trying to do. The jargon alone was stressing out brain cells in my head that had made a home on a tropical beach in the Neuron Ocean and never expected to be called to duty.

The characters and punctuation of the English language occupied the coffins with names from Mrs. Thirty-two to Mr. One Hundred and Twenty-seven. The other coffins were called non-printing characters. This was kinder than referring to them as number-challenged discards.

As you might expect, all these unemployed nuts loitering in the coffins became fair game to manipulative programmers bent on erecting their own personal gratification systems. These gratification seekers started rounding up the nuts and putting them in slave camps where they had to perform computer instructions all day long and never got to sun themselves on a printed page.

Some of them, the High Bit stiffs in the coffins past Mr. One-Twenty-Seven, were assigned to be negative numbers. This tickled hell out of the Zero coffin since it restored His Royal Neuterness to his natural state of being in the center of all the action.

This whole activity of the manipulative programmers eventually spawned programs called Word Processors.

None of the Word Processor programs used the nut coffins in the same way, so all the files produced by them were dramatically different. Not only that, but in the DOS world, the coffins were welded together to the right, whereas in the Unix world they were welded together to the left! Pretty nutty stuff.

Ergo, as you can see, all these programs needed to be interpreted and put into a different graveyard where typesetting instructions were buried.

Translation programming. Written in C. In jargonese, Filters. Sifters. Strainers. Pouring bytes through one side of your program and churning out different bytes on the other. Input and output bytes.

Enter me. Yodeling in a universal byte dialect from the peak of Mount Babel. How often in history does a career appear overnight out of thin air. I was like the kid next door when the wheel inventor asked, “Can you do round, boy?”

Sure, and how about a little hole in the middle?

To be continued . . .