A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer

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"A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer" is a humorous poem composed by Gene Ziegler in 1994. It was widely plagiarized on the internet and in print under the title "If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer".

Composition

In 1994, Gene Ziegler, then a professor at Cornell University,^[1] faced a calamity when his young grandson and the boy's older brother "significantly rearranged" the resources on his Macintosh computer.^[1] He composed "A Grandchild's Guide to Using Grandpa's Computer" in an hour that evening.^[2]

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!^[1]

Publication history

Ziegler has stated that he wrote the poem for his internet friends and it was disseminated through emails,

Ziegler's version has been used by teachers, journalists, and speech therapists,[2] and is often cited in discussions of internet publishing ethics.^[1] It was twice set to music – once by a rapper, and once in a Gilbert and Sullivan style by a music teacher^[1] – and part of it is recited in the closing credits of Canadian TV show Dotto's Data Café.^[1]

References