Math And A Mind Inspired

Math And A Mind Inspired

If Billy Joel had endeavored to catalog the history of technology from Babbage to ChatGPT rather than the iconic events of 20th-century world history.

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"Math And A Mind Inspired"
⁠Babbage, Lovelace, Faraday, looms, punchcard overlay,

Difference engines, Alan Turing, crack enigma’s code,

Hewlett, Packard, poor and callow, small garage in Palo Alto,

ENIAC in Philly with ballistics to explode. 


UNIVAC, vote news, CODASYL, vacuum tubes,

Grace Hopper, COBOL scripts, Backus, FORTRAN, Navy ships  

ARPA, ARC, and SRI, Engelbart and HCI

60s GUIs, new Atari, Nolan Bushnell, Pong clips!


Math and a mind inspired,

With the intrigue burning and some textbook learning,

Math and a mind inspired,

Since the ancient heroes who invented zeros


Dennis Ritchie, Kernighan, Bell Labs C, which Unix ran,

Gates and Allen, BASIC talents, Microsoft hocks, 

Steve Jobs, chips for Woz, Wayne accepts his exit clause,

VisiCalc and 8-bits, buy some Apple stock


PCs, new costs, IBMs use MS-DOS

Richard Stallman, open-source, LISA, Jobs is out by force 

GNU code, Lisp panache, Orwell ads for Macintosh

World Wide Web, Berners-Lee, CERN can serve HTTP!


Tools the new world required,

Spinning drives were churning as the tide was turning,

Tools the new world required,

Find your own advantage and invent a language


Linux hooks, Powerbooks, Linus Torvalds, website looks,

Netscape, domains sell, buy yourself a URL

Pentiums, Javascript, Windows-95 has shipped

Amazon, books and merch, answers from a Google search!


Napster pirates, iMac, WiFi and camera jacks

Y2K, iPod, Roombas as a maid squad,

MySpace, OSX, Facebook friends and cyber-sex,

Firefox and YouTube, Reddit threads and scroll doom!


Pitch, raise, and get acquired,

VC funds discerning, higher rates returning

Pitch, raise, and get acquired,

Manage cash-flow troubles from the dot-com bubbles


Macbook Pro, ThinkPads, Twitter is the new fad

Kindles, iPhones, Macbook Airs and SIM clones,

Azure, iPad, SmartTVs, iOS and IoT, 

Minecraft, Snapchat, Instagram, Slack apps,

Watson, XBox One, Tesla, and Ethereum,

Uber, Lyft, rides all day, mine some Bitcoin on the way! 


Software for each desire,

Meet your users’ yearnings, it will raise your earnings

Software for each desire,

With a rise in salience comes increased surveillance


Apple Watch, Windows 10, Amazon is in your den,

AirPods, Switch box, Pokémon, TikTok

DeepMind, Bostrom, AlphaGo, WeWork flubs its IPO,

Quantum computation bit, mute your Zoom and take a [sit]


Robinhood and GameStop highs, DALL-E art and new AIs, 

Crypto debts, X-risk threats, SPACs, stonks, SBF,

NFTs of mutant apes, Musk eats Twitter’s sour grapes,

Metaverse, build web3, have a Chat with GPT! 


Clouds have replaced the wires,

Is the world discerning AGI’s concerning?

Clouds have replaced the wires,

But ‘till bugs are gone, 

We will still code on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on…

Written By: "Weird" Ev Coopersmith & AE Studio

"We Didn't Start The Fire"
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television

North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe


Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom

Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen

Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye


We didn't start the fire

It was always burning, since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it


Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev

Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron

Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"


Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team

Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev

Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez


We didn't start the fire

It was always burning, since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it


Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac

Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball

Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide


Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia

Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy

Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo


We didn't start the fire

It was always burning, since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it


Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"

Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania

Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex

JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?


We didn't start the fire

It was always burning, since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it


Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again

Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock

Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline

Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan


"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide

Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz

Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law

Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore


We didn't start the fire

It was always burning, since the world's been turning

We didn't start the fire

But when we are gone

It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on

Written By: Billy Joel, 1989