Computer Upgrade
The upgrade path to the most powerful and satisfying computer:
Pocket calculator
- or -
Commodore Pet / Apple II / TRS 80 / Commodore 64 / Timex Sinclair
IBM PC
Apple Macintosh
Fastest workstation of the time (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice)
Minicomputer (HP, DEC, IBM, SGI: your choice)
Mainframe (IBM, Cray, DEC: your choice)
Yes, you just sit back and do all of your computing through lowly graduate students.
Imagine the advantages:
Multi-processing, with as many processes as you have students. You can easily
add more power by promising more desperate undergrads that they can indeed
escape college through your guidance. Special student units can even handle
several tasks *on*their*own*!
Full voice recognition interface. Never touch a keyboard or mouse again. Just
mumble commands and they *will* be understood (or else!).
No hardware upgrades and no installation required. Every student comes
complete with all hardware necessary. Never again fry a chip or $10,000 board
by improper installation! Just sit that sniveling student at a desk, give it writing
utensils (making sure to point out which is the dangerous end) and off it goes.
Low maintenance. Remember when that hard disk crashed in your Beta 9900,
causing all of your work to go the great bit bucket in the sky? This won't
happen with grad. students. All that is required is that you give them a good
*whack!* upside the head when they are acting up, and they will run good as
new.
Abuse module. Imagine yelling expletives at your computer. Doesn't work too
well, because your machine just sits there and ignores you. Through the grad
student abuse module you can put the fear of god in them, and get results to
boot!
Built-in lifetime. Remember that awful feeling two years after you bought your
GigaPlutz mainframe when the new faculty member on the block sneered at you
because his FeelyWup workstation could compute rings around your dinosaur?
This doesn't happen with grad. students. When they start wearing and losing
productivity, simply give them the PhD and boot them out onto the street to
fend for themselves. Out of sight, out of mind!
Cheap fuel: students run on Coca Cola (or the high-octane equivalent -- Jolt
Cola) and typically consume hot spicy Chinese dishes, cheap taco substitutes,
or completely synthetic macaroni replacements. It is entirely unnecessary to
plug the student into the wall socket (although this does get them going a little
faster from time to time).
Expansion options. If your grad. students don't seem to be performing too well,
consider adding a handy system manager or software engineer upgrade. These
guys are guaranteed to require even less than a student, and typically establish
permanent residence in the computer room. You'll never know they are around!
(Which you certainly can't say for an AXZ3000-69 150 gigahertz space-heater
sitting on your desk with its ten noisy fans....) [Note however that the
engineering department still hasn't worked out some of the idiosyncratic bugs
in these expansion options, such as incessant muttering at nobody in particular,
occasionally screaming at your grad. students, and posting ridiculous messages
on world-wide bulletin boards.]
So forget your Babbage Engines and abacuses (abaci?) and PortaBooks and DEK
666-3D's and all that other silicon garbage. The wave of the future is in wetware,
so invest in graduate students today! You'll never go back!