Christmas Tale

There was once, in a house just like yours and mine, a computer. This computer was an ordinary one linked to many ordinary things like any computer. In this computer were several Christmas greetings messages which were to be sent out, but the owner had gone to sleep or to celebrate, the computer didn't know, without sending them.

As it was midnight and no one had sent these messages yet, the computer decided to do it on his own, for once. On Christmas eve, it was certainly allowed for a computer to act in order to do something good, wasn't it?

So he called out to his friend the modem:

"Hey, you guy... Sleepin'? Turn on, there's job to be done! Merry Christmas, by the way!"

"What's happening?" asked the printer. "Are you mad, Computer? Can't you sleep and leave us..."

"You're funny, grandma!" laughed the mouse. "Were *you* sleepin'?"

"You're older than I am, little old mouse. Now let me print a song."

"Yes, take this one!" cried the screen. And he displayed their owner's favourite song and all the others, or nearly, applauded.

"Hey, twins, wake up, you too!" shouted the mouse. "Help us sing this wonderful song so that Modem wake up."

The song was sung three times before the modem awoke. Her best friend, the mouse, said it was Christmas. As a reply, she sang her own hymn and connected the whole bunch to the network. Very soon the messages reached the central computer and left off for other areas, other countries.

But suddenly another computer suggested through the central computer to all his brothers: "Why do we not send each other Christmas greetin's? Don't we know, too, how to do it?"

"Yeah," growled the central computer, "and I suppose *I* am to have them sent to all of you, hey? The one workin' is always me."

"What's the matter?" asked the huge calculator from the other end of the world. "Who is complaining about what? What's wrong, kids?"

"They wanna send Christmas greetings, as if *we* need *that*!" spat the central computer.

Other computers transmitted the information to the calculator, who started to laugh. He calculated appropriate greetings for all the reachable computers and sent them. All rejoiced and showed the greetings to their home friends. Even grandma printer laughed in the home we were first in and they were all reconciled.

Suddenly the huge dictionary computer, Calculator's sister, cried out in all the languages which use writing: "I suggest that I should write a Christmas card to all your owners."

And all started working again: Dictionary wrote messages in more than one thousand languages and called out to all the appropriate applications so that they should use the correct writing for each language. Several hours later this tremendous work was over and all the machines started behaving as usual again, now that they had dealt with their job properly.

Next morning, You went to your computer because you wanted to know whether He, She and They had sent messages. Some of them had. You were a little sad because She had forgotten, but you realised that she was on a trip, so of course she couldn't write to you. But You were quite amazed when you discovered this message:

"All the computers and their friends apologise for having been so mean sometimes during the year and so stubborn, too, when they did wrong things according to what you wanted them to do. They all wish you a merry Christmas, as you human beings say, and a happy new year - this, we know what it means since it is number-related. We wish to become more and more reliable so that you can really do whatever you want to with us. Again, merry Christmas and a blessed new year to all of you, dear networkers and computer users!”

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