You've heard of Murphy's Law - the one that says if something can go wrong, it will. But have you heard of Murphy's Laws of Computer Programming? Check them out below (plus a couple of others!).

Murphy's Laws of Computer Programming

To err is human but to really screw up you need a computer.

Any given program when running is obsolete.

If a program is useful, it will have to be replaced.

If a program is useless, it will have to be upgraded.

Any given program will expand to over-fill the available memory.

The value of a program is inversely proportional to the amount it costs.

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Gubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

There's always at least one more bug.

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Harvard's Law, as applied to computers.

Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the computer will do as it darn well pleases.

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"Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capability of the programmer who must maintain it."

Quotes

"Computers in the future may perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics forecasting the development of computer technology, 1949)

"I see no advantage whatsoever to the graphical user interface." (Bill Gates, 1983)

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943 on seeing the first mainframe computer)

"But what . . . is it good for?" (Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968 commenting on the microchip.)

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."(Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of now defunct Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" (Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." (Bill Gates, 1981 (Even today when you look under window's shell, guess what you find - 640K hi-mem/lo-mem)

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Anecdote

Do you know where the term debugging came from?

Eniac, the first general purpose computer, contained 18,000 vacuum tubes. This generated a lot of light and heat which attracted moths. These bugs would fly around the tubes and periodically cause problems for Eniac, so some of the people working with it would have to go and "debug" it.

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There are many pages on the Internet which have jokes and humorous "blurbs". Sites from which we accessed materials are: http://www.thecommittedsardine.net, www.oraclehumor.com, http://humorvault.tripod.com/computer, and http://www.jokesoup.com/compjokes.htm.We have not linked directly to these sites as they also contain material which, in our opinion, is not appropriate to this site.

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