WHITE HEAT

WHITE HEAT

A poem about computers on TV

Way back when computers were the size of a room

A mechanical mansion took mankind to the moon

Nowadays your toaster could fly people to Mars

Whilst kids hack the Pentagon in flashy coffee bars

Back then we knew just how the future would be

Television told us all about this exciting technology

How computers would come to dominate the earth

Claiming to be our benefactors for all that was worth

Rooms wall-to-wall with blinking coloured lights
Burbling familiar bleeps of radiophonic delights

Whirring great big spinning spools of magnetic tape

Electronic machines with our future to shape

Punchcards were shuffled spat out and fed back in

Slotted cardboard ghosts now haunting the machine

The future is arriving - the future is now TIM

The future’s so much better with a natty acronym

WOTAN’s Will Operating Thought Analogue

Space Intruder Detector SID had us all agog

REMAK was a Remote Electo-Matic Agent Killer

Knight Industries Two Thousand was KITT far sillier

Doctor Who met BOSS intent on world domination

A Bimorphic Operational Systems Supervising station

Then ran into the Oracle and the war machine Mentalis

Surely those computers had far bigger plans than this

Xoanon just went mad a bit - care of the mighty Tom

But at least it didn’t want to end all life with atom bombs

Ziggy stayed at home whilst Sam leapt to change beliefs

Holly, Hilly and Queeg add some much needed comic relief

Batman had a Batcomputer in a Batcave that was Batfreaky

Supersmug Dr Theopolis hung around with Twiki

There are some friendly helpful ones like BOX and K9

Whilst Mister Smith the fireplace had the odd droll line

The General spent time washing speed-learned minds

But went bang flash because it didn’t know “Why?”

Out in space the M5 computer took on Captain Kirk

Wanting in the main it seemed to put him out of work

Liberator’s ZEN was a big brown ball of flashing squares

Blew up in deep space where they couldn’t get the spares

Then Blake’s lot got a SLAVE built into Scorpio for a time

Which ended up crashing on a planet named Gauda Prime

Hitch-hiker’s Guidebooks, Deep Thought and Eddie

And here’s something for which the world’s not ready

Genuine People Personalities like the one in Marvin

When Zaphod went a-stealin’ turns out he got a bargain

You think that a computer ought to be your pal

Honestly people, does nobody remember HAL?

There’s not much fight in a flashing box of lights

Unless that is it’s ORAC - both tetchy and uptight

An automated future setting earth’s people free

In the bright white heat of new technology

In the blink of a bulb humanity’s fate is sealed

Gullible mankind starts to see truth revealed

Like David Brent for every TIM there’s a BOSS you see

Many of them seem intent on starting World War Three

Humans must prepare themselves to have new cyber masters

Who aren’t creative but can count things up so much faster

In preparation have a set of insolvable equations ready

Or make computers wonder what precisely love might be

Save the world once again with a witty payoff joke

As the room is filling up with big blue clouds of smoke

So as that tiny tinny voice is fading down to zero

Rejoice! Rejoice! As the humans are again the heroes

Yet remember it was Harold who built The Machine

And people made Samaritan - if you know what I mean

Computers may be here to stay in pockets everywhere

Sitting on desks in front of us and becoming more aware

From time to time remind them who really pulls the strings

And beware of anybody bearing over-stretched acronyms

Martin A W Holmes, April 2018