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On The PC

from Debasement Tapes by Tom Smith

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This was written for ChiCon, the 1991 World Science Fiction Convention, and is still pretty popular... if way, way out of date. Heck, the Commodore Amiga was still kind of a player at that point. See the next track, "PC99", for an upgrade.

lyrics

The source code is always cleaner on somebody else's drive.
You dream about each new upgrade, without which you must survive.
You're not a registered user, you're more of a pirate bold,
You got no support or manuals for software that's four years old.

On the PC, on the PC,
There is no viler shell or compiler than one that's free,
If you want to ease your awful pain,
Then you got to stick with public domain,
But bootleg the disk and
You're living risky
On the PC.

The IBM folk is snooty, they got Super VGA.
The Macintosh folk ain't snooty, Amiga blows them away.
But Macintosh folk is lucky, Big Blue got a worser fate:
Keeping everything compatible - down to Eighty-Eighty-Eight.
Oh, God!

On the PC, on the PC,
Companies bloat us with templates for Lotus One, Two and Three,
Microsoft runs at a snail's pace,
And we all know why the call it "d-Base,"
But the worst vice is,
Look at the prices

For the PC, so you stole with glee,
Disks unprotected -- now you're infected virally.
If you'd paid the bucks, you'd be secure,
Now your whole collection you've got to cure,
Rip out your hair and
Call the repairman
For the PC.

There's fuzz in the SCSI, lint in the print,
The modem, she owe them a lot down at Sprint,
The optical drive is coming alive,
And spits out the CD-Rom.

The cable's too short for the parallel port,
One click of the mouse begins full abort,
The disks burn to ash, the system will crash,
And hear that hard drive BOMB!

(Chorus chords, played as instrumental; look deadpan at the audience and say, "Loading final chorus -- please wait")

Dump your PC, dump your PC,
Buy an Amiga, even a Sega does more for me,
Buddy, your computer really stinks,
You could get more power out of a Lynx,
Go on safari,
Find an Atari,
Dump your PC.

It's a big-name toy,
Up there with Game-Boy,
Dump your PC.

Macintosh Plusses
Crash all their busses.
Bald guys in crew-necks
All turn to Unix,
PS/2 can't, man --
It's just a Plant Stand,
Dump your PC!

credits

from Debasement Tapes, released May 25, 1999
Words: Tom Smith, after Howard Ashman
Music: "Under the Sea" by Alan Menken

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Tom Smith Ann Arbor

Weird Al with more books, JoCo with more jokes, Carlin with more Cthulhu. Since 1985, Tom Smith has been breaking hearts, minds, and laws of propriety and physics with his insane blend of sf/fantasy, Life With Computers, pop culture, politics, and puns. More than twenty albums later, he maintains the best is yet to come. ... more

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