Simon Brooke
2005-12-16 00:12:27 UTC
'Is there anybody there' typed the usenaught
Posting to the empty spool;
And his fans in the silence stirred the dustmotes
and kept the system cool.
No troll appeared from under the bridges,
Nor spammer nor poster of tripe:
And he rattled his keyboard a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he typed.
But no-one responded to the usenaught;
No reader from over the hill
Looked up and noticed his new thread,
Where he sat perplexed and still.
But only a host of random indexers
That archived each message passed
Sat copying out the stream of the packets
Of that note that had come at last;
Sat copying the RFC ten three six headers,
And seeking the sig sep mark,
Transcribing the byte stream clear and open
Of that message sent into the dark.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their empty archiving of bytes,
While his fans whirred, beating the still air,
And stirring the sleeping mites;
For he suddenly struck on the keys, even
Harder, his keyboard bounced as he smote :-
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I found no FAQ', he wrote.
Never a byte sent the crawlers,
Though every word he sent
Went rattling through the skipping of the disk heads
That knew not what he meant:
Ay, they read his bits upon the bytestream,
And the flicking from zero to one,
And now they endlessly index and store them,
But readers come there none.
Posting to the empty spool;
And his fans in the silence stirred the dustmotes
and kept the system cool.
No troll appeared from under the bridges,
Nor spammer nor poster of tripe:
And he rattled his keyboard a second time;
'Is there anybody there?' he typed.
But no-one responded to the usenaught;
No reader from over the hill
Looked up and noticed his new thread,
Where he sat perplexed and still.
But only a host of random indexers
That archived each message passed
Sat copying out the stream of the packets
Of that note that had come at last;
Sat copying the RFC ten three six headers,
And seeking the sig sep mark,
Transcribing the byte stream clear and open
Of that message sent into the dark.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their empty archiving of bytes,
While his fans whirred, beating the still air,
And stirring the sleeping mites;
For he suddenly struck on the keys, even
Harder, his keyboard bounced as he smote :-
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I found no FAQ', he wrote.
Never a byte sent the crawlers,
Though every word he sent
Went rattling through the skipping of the disk heads
That knew not what he meant:
Ay, they read his bits upon the bytestream,
And the flicking from zero to one,
And now they endlessly index and store them,
But readers come there none.
--
***@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; this is not a .sig
***@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; this is not a .sig