The MAYFLOWER COMPAQ

E-mail extracted from the hard drive of a recently unearthed  Compaq desktop PC offers a tantalizing glimpse into the day-to-day life of a primitive Internet society, said archaeologists responsible for its     discovery  --The Onion,  May 30, 2006

HERE THE TRUE ORIGIN  OF THIS INFERNAL MACHINE IS REVEALED--                                                                                                                                      
Since 1620 New England has looked to The Puritan Broadcafting System for its History of Technology  lessons. Yet Antiques Road Show's capacity for self-appraisal is limited- it recently  described a gadget  delivered to The Bay Colony in 1638 as  “ The nation’s first printing press.”

This is arrant knavery on the part of The Elders of PBS --any mechanical Philosopher , as Baroque webmonkeys were called , would attest that infernal Machine was forsooth a PC peripheral.  It's time to acknowledge that Blogging , like bundling , was a custom of the  Pilgrim Fathers-  Nataniel Hawthorne relates that Hester Prynne's lap-top was busy even before the Mayflower landed . So here are some notes from the New England Journal of Computation's predecessor   Ye Wire'd Boftonian

Ye cuftom of Blogging began with the software revolution instaurated by the Commonwealth's late Lord Protector, who develop'd that happy Instrument of New England's preservation :
Ye Cromwell Disc Drive  

Ere the Founders of the Bay Colony  set foot on Plymouth Rock, they esteem'd blogging a duty to God. What school-childe knowes not of the earliest American PC , The Mayflower Compaq ?

In the Year of our Lord 1638  the Compaq's New Model Operating Syftem brought forth the first Print-Out evidencing the Pilgrim's Progress . The Freeman’s Oath was a Puritanically Correct  piece of Constitutional source code , which made voting conditional on church attendance , for during the Reformation, blogging , like voting, remained a privilege of clergy.  The Oath was necessitated by New England’s gloomy forests, whose dense foliage ruined the Pilgrim Fathers’ Wi Fi reception. To upload the sermons on which the moral cohesion of Massachufetts depended , Bay Colonists had to be sat down each Sabbath and read to aloud for four or five hours.

Before lunch- Sabbath afternoons were quality time reserved for accusing  neighbors of witchcraft and  disputing whether damnation is best obtain'd by faith,or good works.

After Harvard's foundation , Calvinist content-providing nurgeoued, and clergymen began to fear sermon piracy. Hence the College sent to England for the latest in hard-copy server  technology , a mighty oaken maine-frame denominated the Ingeniose Blackletter Matrix CCCLX. The sight of these heathenish Numerals filled the Lord's Elect with great alarm, for they sufpected it to be a work of the Antichrist capable of  copying their e-mails to the Pope of Rome. To restore Comity the ungodly Contrivance was rechristened Ye IBM 360.   

Whilst  primitive hand-held devices  were brought to our shores by 10th century Viking  ubergeeks --’ Vinland’ is but a mifprint for 'Black-Berry Land' --the ingeniose Matrix could difpatch  Disreputable Vellum Discs denouncing Miftress Prynne’s Adulteries fast as deer could be skinned for parchment.

  Wi Fi  Reform'd by ye Pilgrim Bloggers  
Finding readers  was another matter, for Harvard could obtain few undergraduates able to parse English or Linux upon entering college, or read Latin and Greek on leaving it, a problem which plagues our nation to this day. The dearth of literate offspring drove the Puritans to lend the  bulky Matrix to Salem for use as a witch-press, and to consider of  outsourcing data entry to the Indians, but so slow was communication bewixt  Boston and Bangalore that Native Americans were  recruited in their stead.

This proved disastrous. Though familiarity  with smoke-signals  made breech-clouted savages adept at mastering internet protocols. no sooner had they sampled Puritan cooking than they dropped their tomahawks and ran gibbering into the woods. There they founded Dartmouth College, and realizing Puritan fears of IP theft, developed a lucrative trade in Algonquin Bibles, Anabaptist pornography and Quaker self-help manuals.

Though Governor Winthrop's innovative use of ear cropping  limited these heretical Enormities, Anno 1729 , a mad Unitarian mullah named Elihu Yale  eftablished a diploma mill in the Pequot Indian Territory ,issuing false  Doctorates of Divinity  under the impudent  Mottoe : "Linux Et Veritas " 

Soon the renegadoe Yale's pernicious homilies were common as  fire-water in the trading-posts of The E-Bay Colony by the shores of Gitche Gumee. There was scarce enough birch-bark upon which to print replies , and The very reverend Cotton Mather had to abandon his efforts to convert the forest primeval into edible clothing and take up papermaking. He sold his Surplus to the sot-weed factors of  Virginia who used it to devise a devilish instrument call'd the Cigarettoe . At the same time , the  Dominies of the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam dispatched  goodbody John Appleseed to spread cider orchards westward . Suchlike Enterprises soon gave rise to an ultramontane Population , whose need of Clergy  inspired   Fear-God Gates, rusticated from Harvard for possession of playing cards, and  Increase Jobs, an admirer of the works of Appleseed,  to apply themselves to the propagation of the Word. 

                                        Programming Ye CCCLX Main-Frame:

                              Goodbody Jobs & Reverend Gates Lock'd in Disputation

                                   at the Puritan Dual -Processers Synod of 1679

Providence smiled on their Zeal. From Jobs'  plantation the MacIntosh did mutate and from Gate's Yankee ingenuity arose a great awakening of the right to self-publish sermons on all subjects civil and moral, Areopagitically, as Milton intended, without the least fear of editing. They knew not what they did, and today in every shining City on a Hill ,the Lord's Elect call down the Wrath of almighty Providence upon them

Once the Mayflower Compaq  provided  America's only blog . Now they are ground out faster than counterfeit Wampum, in numbers  so Un-Godly that before the End of Days preterite bloggerel may  overflow our inboxes each Sabbath morn. God grant us a good deliverance from the first fruits of New England. 

Comments

[John Burgess]

If I recall correctly from Steven Weisenburger's exegesis of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," Pynchon's ancestor William Pynchon--founder of Springfield, MA, by the way--did in fact leave the Bay Colony in order to return to London to stop an IP offense being committed against his sermons.

That his sermons themselves served as cause to get him booted out of the colony is another matter.

[John Hallyburton]

That would be CCCLX, not CCCVX.

[Peter McGrath]

Well if it's a PC peripheral, you won't be able to get the drivers any more. And if you could they'd drive on the wrong side of the road.