Procol HarumBeyond
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A Brighter Grade of SAIL
Well ... imitation is said to be the sincerest form of flattery: the following verse comes from a website featuring song-parodies written by computer programmers. There is a huge list of these, Sam Cameron reports, very many of them based on songs by Queen: they tend to feature the name of some programming language or bit of development kit in the title ...
Title – A Brighter Grade of SAIL
Original – A Whiter Shade of Pale
Group – Procul Harem
Author – MaJoC
Intro – Apologies to Don Knuth, who may never have been involved in the shenanigans portrayed in the first verse; in particular, the equation "CPU instruction bus + D/A + V/F + speaker = tune" may have been specific to Atlas mainframes, which I doubt he had access to. However, the events of the second verse, and of the chorus, are a matter of public record.
A Brighter Grade of SAIL
Das
Blinkenlights fandango
Racing disc drives 'cross
the floor
Operators kind of
seething
But the clowns cried out
for more
The cooling fans thrummed
harder
Extra heat to blow away
And the siren on the CPU
Piped The Crossing of the
Tay
And so it was that
later
As we chased the guru's
tail
That his source at first
assembler
Turned a brighter grade
of SAIL.
He said he'd take one
season
Eight years later we
could see
Still his fists were in
the code 'cos
He could not let it be
Once its umpteenth beta
version
Had been tested coast-to-coast
We forgave his slight
diversion
When development he froze
And so it was that
later
As we chased the guru's
tail
That his source at first
assembler
Turned a brighter grade
of SAIL.
Thanks to Dr Carter, who remarks, 'It's taken me some years to appreciate that computer filk is usually impenetrable to J Random Mundane, like jazz: "Lady, if you have to have it explained, you ain't never nohow gonna understand it." Have a trawl through the rest of my offerings, and see if you can cite any counterexamples.'
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