A Geek Tragedy (with a happy ending)

“Oh my dear Lisa, my love for you is greater than the through-put of a T1 line. I simply must have you as my own. Not as a client-server relationship, but as an equal peer-to-peer connection.”

“Oh, Zeke, you know I love it when you talk that way. And you know I’d give myself to you. I just wish I had DSL rather than dial-up so I could love you at a theoretical 1.5Mbps, rather than 56kbps.”

“Oh, Lisa, we simply must get married. Elope with me. I know a wonderful internet chapel where we can have the interface.”

“Oh, Zeke, you know I would never marry without the approval of my father.”

“Then I shall send an interrupt request to him right away to ask for you handshake in marriage.”

“But you know he’d never send an ACK signal. You know how he disapproves of PCs, especially 15-year-old PCs.”

In his CPU clock, Zeke knew she was right, for Zeke was but an old Tandy 1000 SX, with an 8086 processor and Lisa was a 2002 iMac.

But Zeke was not one to give up easily, and that was sometimes amusing to Lisa. Just the previous Valentine’s Day, Zeke tried to play an mp3 of Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore”, but the codec was so slow, Dean sounded like a rapper in a seizure.

So with great determination, Zeke went to Lisa’s father.

“You can marry my daughter over my cold, dead mid-tower case!” replied Lisa’s father. “What makes you think I would let you marry her?”

“Well, sir, we love each other and Lisa–“

“Don’t call her that,” snapped Lisa’s father. “You know that’s not her name.” And so it wasn’t. It was actually her great-grandmother’s name. Zeke just called her that as a term of endearment. Her father disliked the name because it reminded him of his family’s shady origins.

“Look at yourself; You’re a PC, and a 15-year-old one at that. How do you plan on interfacing with her?”
“Well, she could get a DOS board.”

“She will do no such thing. This family has a proud and pure tradition. And even if she did, how would you hook up? My Jobs, you don’t even have a network card.”

“Uh… floppy disk?”

Zeke realized just a moment too late what he had said. Lisa’s father shot him a glare that would have shriveled up even the Sircam virus. It was a sore spot for him that his daughter didn’t have a floppy drive. Of course, he’d never admit it. When Lisa was a young computer, still going to pro-grammar school, she’d come home crying because the other young computers would tease her about her lack of floppy drive. Her father told her that they were just jealous because they were old and obsolete, but he knew it was still a dumb idea to make a computer without a disk drive.

“Young man, you have no business asking to marry my daughter,” exploded Lisa’s father. “Not only are you not allowed to marry her, but I forbid you from even seeing her ever again!”

Zeke left broken and dejected. He felt as if some one had ripped out his CPU clock and stomped on it. From her Ikea designer computer desk, Lisa could hear the entire conversation. Lisa’s tears fell gently and the puddle they made nearly short-circuited her.

That night, Lisa received an encrypted e-mail from Zeke. It read "192.168.100.50. 0:00GMT. Be there.”

****

“Oh, Zeke! My tears are more numerous than the bits of my 40 GB hard disk (343,597,383,680 bits to be exact).”

“Oh, Lisa, my sorrow is greater than what can be expressed by a double-precision floating-point variable. But maybe your father is right. Who am I to marry you? You’re an iMac, and I’m just a dumb Tandy.”

“Don’t say that Zeke! I don’t care what you are. I love you. And I’ll always love you.”

“As I will always love you. But maybe some things just weren’t meant to be. Goodbye, my dear Lisa. Maybe someday we’ll meat again.”

“Zeke, no! Don’t go!” But it was too late. Zeke had already logged off. All that remained was the quiet hum of the carrier signal.

--6 Months Later--

The Macintosh family had just finished their evening meal and Lisa’s father had just settled down to smoke his pipe-line and browse through Google news. Lisa went to her network port immediately after dinner, without saying a word. She was still mad at her father.

It was bad enough that he had sent Zeke away, but it only aggravated the problem when he tried to set her up with other Macintoshes. They were all the same: nice-guys who were friendly but thought they new everything and wouldn’t let Lisa do anything for herself. She was just warming up to one when he noticed that some of Lisa’s MIME types normally associated with Quicktime were associated with other applications and asked her if she wanted to correct the problem. What a turn-off.

Lisa was just plugging into her network cable when a ping came at the gateway. “I’ll get it,” Lisa announced as she opened the firewall port. When she saw who was on the other side, her resolution dropped and her CD-ROM drive hung open. “Hello, Lisa,” came Zeke’s calm, cool voice.

When her father heard this, he came running to the port. “Young man, I told you never to–.” He stopped short as he looked out at Zeke, adopting a similar expression to Lisa’s. Across Zeke’s monitor appeared a single word: “ROOT”.

“My Jobs!” exclaimed Lisa’s father. “He’s gone Unix!”

“Hello, Mr. Macintosh. I came to ask for your daughter’s mouse in marriage.”

Lisa’s father looked back and forth from Zeke to Lisa. Zeke’s external appearance hadn’t changed much, except the ‘S’ in ‘1000SX’ had been scratched off. He still looked like a PC. But then he looked at Lisa. He hadn’t seen her this happy in six months. Zeke wasn’t an Apple, and he didn’t fit in the family’s proud and pure tradition, but maybe it was good to move on and bring some fresh code into the family. His CPU began to soften.

“Young man,” he began sternly, “I would be honored to have you as a son.”

--Epilogue--

A year later found the Macintosh family at the tech support room of Fry’s Electronics. Lisa’s father paced nervously in the waiting room. Then the IT assistant opened the door. “Mr. Macintosh? You can come in now.” He led the Macintoshes to the lab where Zeke and Lisa were. As they walked in, the lab technician handed Lisa and Zeke their newborn computer. “Congratulations,” he said. “It’s an operating system.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Lisa’s mother. “What are you going to name it?”

“What did we decide on, Zeke?” asked Lisa.

“OS X,” answered Zeke.

The preceding was written entirely in my Networking and Telecommunications class, taught by Dr. David Dombrowski. Your college tuition money at work.