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.
"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
"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
