In the beginning, all was void, with the spirit of God brooding over the dark vapors.

Then God said: LET THERE BE BYTE, and there was byte. God saw the byte, and was pleased with it, and divided the byte in bits. He created a multitude of similar bytes, all identical in their ethereal perfection, and all containing zeros, for zeros were all there were.

On the second day God toyed with the bytes, and organized them into groups to which he said: YOU SHALL BE CALLED WORDS, FOR FROM BYTES YOU CAME AND OF BYTES YOU ARE COMPOSED.

And God saw the words, that they were good and was pleased. On the third day God said (to whom God was talking has never has never been ascertained or even questioned): I HAVE WORDS, MADE UP OF BYTES, MADE UP OF BITS, BUT SOMETHING'S MISSING.

So God scraped up a lump of clay, squeezed it tightly in his mighty hands, and flung it against the sky, where it solidified into a smoky mass. God saw the steaming heap, that it was good and said to it: YOU SHALL BE CALLED HARDWARE, A HOME FOR MY BYTES AND BITS, AND AS YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST OF YOUR KIND I SHALL CALL YOU CPU.

And God turned, and with a flick of his wrist spew forth tape drives (FOR YOU SHALL BE TEMPORARILY A HOME FOR MY WORDS...), stations, whole teleprocessing installations.

And God saw all this sparkling in the heavens, that it was good and he was pleased.

Having done all this, God rested.

On the fourth day, God reviewed all that he had done. He saw his bits and his bytes statistically on an infinite variety of media. But he was not satisfied. SOMETHING'S MISSING, said he, I NEED TO ANIMATE MY TREASURED BYTES TO GIVE THEM LIFE.

So God leaned back, touched a soiled hand to his mighty brow, and with one single, all-powerful thought set his hardware in motion.

YOU said he to the intangible breath now coursing through his hardware, I SHALL CALL SOFTWARE, FOR ...(so on, and so forth.)

And he continued: YOU ARE THE FIRST, THE BEST, THE MOST PERFECT AND OMNIPOTENT SOFTWARE. And God divided the software in many parts, into utilities,compilers, system libraries and his favorite, most privileadged and beloved operating system.

God was pleased, so he rested.

On the fifth day, God again surveyed all that he had done, and was filled with joy. He found that with his creation he could determine the value of pi to ten thousand digits. He found that he could produce flowcharts of his beloved operating system, and these he posted by his throne. He discovered that he could run off Snoopy calendars, pictures of Mona Lisa, and witty little computer accounts of creation. And with at terminal at his throne, he didn't have to travel halfway to hell to access his system.

He called his creation IMPERATUM BYTE MAGNAMUS (or IBM for short).

But all was not well. God's beloved system was so large, so complex, that even the mighty God - maker of heavens and earth (but that's another story), the builder of cpu and virtual memory, the author of fortran - even that God was hard-pressed to keep up on how everything worked.

So God said I'LL MAKE ME A MAN.

And he did, and to the man he said YOU SHALL BE CALLED (logically enough) "MAN" AND TO YOU SHALL FALL THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MAINTAINING ALL THAT I HAVE DONE.

And to keep Man happy after-hours, God gave him Woman, saying to Man FOR I KNOW THAT EVEN BYTES GET HUNGRY FOR A LITTLE BIT.

And God rested, chuckling at his own play on words.

On the sixth day, God mounted his throne, logged onto his terminal, and engaged in a full day of uninterrupted 1-second turnaround. He saw all that he had done, that it was good. He was pleased that from his first byte he had created such a wonderful and extensive toy. He created file after file, he performed advanced and impressive on-line data base updates, he wrote a faster and more extensive fortran compiler, and in general rejoiced in the perfection of his IBM.

After a hard day's work on a hot terminal - during which Man was quietly familiarizing himself with the system documentation - God called it a day (YOU I SHALL CALL DAY... and so forth and so on.)

On the seventh day - so tired was he form the week's labors - God slept all day. What transpired on that crucial seventh day is recounted in THE FALL OF MAN...

Late in the sixth day of creation, Woman called Man at work and begged him to come home, as dinner was getting cold. Man grudgingly consented, but brought home with him a copy of the system documentation to study. After dinner, Woman cooed some suggestive little sighs and slipped invitingly into bed. Man followed, but - being beat after a hard day at the office - fell straight to sleep.

Woman had an indescribable inner feeling that this was not how things should be on their first night in bed (or in existance, for that matter), and disdainfully flung Man's notebook from the night stand. The book fell open to an important-looking page marked WARNING in bold red letters. Now, Woman was possessed of insatiable curiosity. God - we must assume - been entirely familiar with contemporary Greek writings on the subject, particularly with the escapades of a wayward feminist named Pandora. At any rate, Woman picked up the book, and read: