Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven. When he got
there, he was met by Saint Peter.
Saint Peter said, "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background
like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."
"Job assignment?"
"Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on your
backside and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your
weight around here! Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing
center. We're building the largest computing facility in creation. Half a
million computers connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running
into a back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully
fault-tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."
Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This is
really Heaven!"
Saint Peter said, "Would you like to go see the center now?" "You bet!"
Saint Peter and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data
processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the
Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber
optic cables properly installed. But the center was dominated by the computers.
Half a million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million .... ....
Macintoshes .... .... all running Claris software! Not a PC in sight! Not a
single byte of Microsoft code!
The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent
his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill.
"What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about Excel???
What about Word???"
"You're forgetting something," said Saint Peter.
"What's that?" asked Bill plaintively.
"This is Heaven," explained Saint Peter. "We need a computer system that's
heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs
running Windows, then ... GO TO HELL!"