[IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the
transition from {punched card} to tape was traumatic (nobody has
dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people,
including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be
buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the
card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card
readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called The Last
Bug, the climactic lines of which are as follows:
He died at the console
Of hunger and thirst.
Next day he was buried,
Face down, 9-edge first.
The eighty-column mind was thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's
customer base and its thinking. This only began to change in the
mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself after the triumph of the
{killer micro}. See {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {code grinder}. A
copy of The Last Bug lives on the the GNU site at
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {punched card}]