The Worble Connection

I was amusing myself at a local 'watering-hole' recently, and struck up a conversation with a tourist who claimed to be actively employed in Redmon, WA, and to have a vast knowledge of computers and computer programming. While we shared a beer or two and swapped lies, this fellow explained everything I wanted to know about Worbles and computers, but was afraid to ask.

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Before we can discuss the importance of the Worble contribution to modern computer technology, we have to examine the steps leading to the development of the Personal Computer. The first practical design was produced by Charles Babbage (1791-1871). His “Cabbage Calculator” (so named because it was powered by 512 silkworms on a diet of shredded cabbage) was the most advanced concept of the day. Babbage spent much time on the design of the engine, or Cabbage Processing Unit of his device, and the speed of the processor was rated in Consumption Per Silkworm or CPS. Like the German physicist Heinrich Hertz who studied the electro-magnetic spectrum, it was not until many years after his death that his contribution was fully recognized and the name of the device changed to the “Babbage Analytical Engine.” Charles Babbage is now considered to be the father of computer processing.

The modern personal computer could not have been developed without the invention of the transistor by Bell Labs in 1947, which was not officially announced to the world until 1948. The transistor soon led to engineering advances in solid state devices and the manufacture of large scale integrated circuits, the forerunner of the “chips” which are the heart of modern CPUs.

Scientists at Bell Labs soon recognized the trained silk worms of the Cabbage Calculator had no place in modern computers. The silk worms were much too large to do their work inside the CPU of a computer, and could only crawl around on the surface of the microchips. Additionally, because silk worms do not swim, they lacked the capability for working with floating point decimal numbers.

Enter the Worbles! Whether the Worbles have co-existed with human life for centuries, or recently arrived (some speculate aboard the Roswell UFO; could this be a coincidence in the time frame?), Bell Labs was soon able to place large numbers of them under contract for work in the burgeoning field of solid state electronics.

Worbles are incredibly small and can easily move quickly between the molecules which make up a microchip. They are also immensly strong and unbelivably fast. No one yet knows the limits of Worble speed, but there is some speculation they are faster than the “tachyon particles” now accepted by quantum physicists. There is limited support within the Information Technology group to quantify Worble speed using “Warp Factors,” but programming enthusiasts wish to avoid this term and prevent being classed as “Trekkies.”

Unless your Worbles are well trained and well treated, it can be difficult to get their attention and get them to perform useful work. Most users are familiar with the older model televisions containing vacuum tubes. Usually you had to give the TV set a “whack up-side the cabinet” to get the attention of the electrons and get them started. The early computers had a similar design quirk, but being so large they occupied several rooms, a whack with the hand or fist was not practical and computers had to be kick-started, or “booted,” a term we still use today.

In the same sense that “quarks” come in different flavors, Worbles can be found in three sexes. The female Worbles were immediately hired by Bell to carry endless streams of information over communication networks, a task for which they are ideally suited because of their talent for mimicing the nuances, inflection, and tones of human speech. You have probably been listening to a female Worble while using your telephone, and laboring under the impression you were speaking to Aunt Tillie in Bayonne, NJ, as the Worbles reproduced the spoken word passed from Aunt Tillie to you.

Initially, the scientists at Bell Labs could find no use for the male Worbles, because they like to congregate in “leagues” and enthusiastically discuss balls, such as baseballs, basketballs, bowling balls, golf balls, etc. It wasn’t until Bell Labs saw the possibility in the spherical shape of electrons to carry the information within solid state devices that male Worbles grudgingly found employment. Some students of Worble behavior believe the “forward pass” was originated for the purpose of increasing the speed at which the Worbles could move the charged electrons from a position on the CPU playing field to the goal at the opposite side.

The remaining Worbles are FUBAR Worbles. These tiny creatures are mutations created by the exposure to endless loops within a CPU. While a mild exposure to an endless loop has a beneficial effect upon Worbles, much like joggers running around a jogging track, prolonged exposure has been shown to have an addictive and deleterious effect upon Worbles, leading to permanent genetic damage. Programmers should constantly strive to avoid infinite loops in their code lest all their Worbles become FUBAR!

Because Worbles are so tiny, their existance has not been proved conclusively, although we can be certain modern computers would not function without them. Much the same as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states we cannot prove a cat to be alive or dead without opening the box and thereby disturbing the cat; neither can we prove the existance of Worbles.

Brad Moore completed the earliest work regarding Worbles, and created the rules for Worble Society based upon his observations. John Davidson took the available literature even further and published his notation groupings, popularly called Davidson’s Unverified Notation Groups, or DUNG. The study of DUNG is a vast undertaking which will probably never be completed without funding provided by the federal government. Fortunately, there are numerous members of the senate and house who are full of DUNG enthusiasm and wish to see this study continue. If the individual ages of Worbles can be verified, legislation is planned to add millions of Worbles to the population of eligible voters.

Worbles are essential to the operation of modern computers. Because of their strength, they can swiftly carry numbers of any size from one memory location to another within the CPU. They can also move alphanumeric data, called STRING$ (because the original silk worms carried such data tied together with silk strings to avoid losing any part of the data) and can quickly sort and order STRING data. Fragments of silk STRING$ tended to collect in the mechanism of early Cabbage Computers, requiring them to be cleaned periodically, or “defragged,” a term still used in modern computer terminology.

In his first observations of Worble behavior, Brad Moore erroneously described them as “really active molecules,” abbreviated as RAM. Brad first used the term MB to describe the micro-blocks inside the CPU where the Worbles live. Each MB is home to 256 Worbles, thus a computer with 512 micro-blocks of RAM has 131,072 Worbles to do the work. His studies verified that installing additional MB of RAM in a computer would add to the efficiency and speed by which information could be processed.

It wasn’t until DUNG was studied intensely by programming luminaries such as Alyce and Janet, that Worbles were identified as sentient creatures with a life of their own, and exhibiting behavior sometimes contrary to the intent of the programmers. Such contrary behavior is usually described as a “glitch” or “bug” in the execution of computer code, and can only be eliminated by patiently sweet-talking the Worbles or offering them “perqs,” such as additional RAM or a math-coprocessor to distribute the workload. Because the majority of female Worbles are employed in communications, the Worbles living inside a CPU are predominantly male and seem to respond more favorably to the persuasive efforts of female programmers.

The amount of work performed by Worbles attributes to significant heat build-up within the computer CPU. In bygone days, processor speeds were modest, but with technology which allowed Worbles to process information at GHz speeds (GollyHesZippin!), heat build-up will continue to be a factor in computer design and manufacture. Recently, liquid cooled computers have become available, but when operated in cold climates, too often these machines freeze up and require re-booting. Liquid cooled CPU’s may provide a benefit to the Worbles, several who have communicated their desires to the computer operator have asked for USB devices translated to mean “un-simmering boxes” for their micro-blocks.

Aircraft and the aviation industry burst upon this planet scarcely more than 100 years ago. Science has used that knowledge to put men upon the Moon while sending dozens of computer controlled vehicles, manned by intrepid Worbles, to the planets and beyond! The Worbles have been here only a short time; it is too early to yet dream what we may accomplish in partnership with them during the next half-century, providing we don’t run out of Worbles.