Some things stay with you forever and I would like to think that the following little poem helped shape me. You see, the first computer I ever played with was the family Archimedes 310 and way before I had ever even heard the term “hacking” I was poking around in some of the library files trying to see how things worked. One of the first library files I looked at contained the following poem stuck in the middle of the code! I still don’t know who wrote it so I’m going to credit the author of the library. Surprisingly I can’t find this poem anywhere on the internet!
Silicon valleys,
Germanium hills,
Digital journeys,
And virtual thrills.Greetings, O hacker,
Feeling unwell?
Microchip tracker,
Welcome to hell.Jon Ribbens – DoggySoft
I found this very poem written backwards in the code of… some game or another. Could have sworn it was a BBC B game I was trying to get working on the BBC Master. I was quite young at the time, and it was also very formative for me. Thing is, instead of “O Hacker” it read “O Faucet” and each line of the poem was written backwards.
Awesome! I think it’s been around for years but very hidden 🙂
I wrote the poem. Although the first word was “silicon” not “silicone” 😉 I put it in the object code of various projects that I released as public domain a great many years ago.
Awesome to hear form you Jon and even better to hear that you wrote it! 🙂
Spelling corrected too 🙂