Vaxymandius

Dave Weingart

(With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley )

Copyright Dave Weingart 1997

I met a programmer for a mainframe brand
Who said -- "Two vast and commentless chunks of code
Stand on the system...near them, by demand
Half-junked, a shattered console lies, whose mode
And paper strips, that tear with each command
Tell that the sysop well those printouts read
Which yet archive, creeping through the token ring,
The RAM that blocked them, the memory that bled;
And on the monitor, these words appear:
'My name is VAXymandias, thing of pings,
Look on my logic, ye coders, and despair!'
No resource inside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal DEC, needing repair,
The lone and loaded drive just spins away."