Humor
Many, many years ago when I was an undergraduate engineering student, I had a student job working for the engineering department to provide maintenance and support for the engineering departments IBM 1620 computer. Anyone familiar with this computer will recognize it as being quite primitive compared with the machines available today. It didn't even have the hardware capability to add and multiply. To do this function, it had to read in "add/multiply tables" from punched cards. If the machine needed to add 2 plus 2, it would go down 2 rows and across 2 columns and find the answer. Everything, programs and data, was stored and read into the computer using punched cards. Very primitive considering that a $4.99 calculator today does this job much better (and doesn't require a room full of electronics). Still, we engineering students loved the machine and made very good use of its limited capabilities.
Unfortunately, forces from the dark side approached. These were business majors in dark suits (well dark tee-shirts at least) who had been forced by their college to take a full year in Fortran II programing. These dark forces were not overly bright--one could always tell a business major by the extreme expression of puzzlement on his face as he entered the computer room in the hopes that this week, unlike the previous six, he would finely be able to get the computer to read his name and print it back out. But what they lacked in brilliance they made up in sheer numbers. There were hordes of them--probably 50 times the number of engineering students. And they took up almost every minute of computer time. Engineering had to find a way to defeat the dark side forces.
Finely, my colleague (another engineering student) and I worked out a diabolical plan that completely defeated the dark side forces. Remember how this computer performed addition by using tables read into the computer from punched cards. Think of just how easy it was to change one number at say the intersection of 2 rows and 2 columns from a four to a five. Suddenly 2+2 = 5. When a dark side force gazed upon his output and it slowly dawned on him that the arithmetic was wrong, well his puzzlement expression would become very severe. About this time, he would approach us and ask about his problem. No we were not so cruel as to tell him to phone tech support in India--that level of cruelty had to await the modern era, we didn't have the imagination to dream up something that diabolical. No, we told him that the computer suffered from something called "digital drift" which had the effect of causing the computer to lose its bits--which is why we kept a "bit bucket" under the computer (sometimes we would show him a real bucket with the label "bit bucket" spray painted on its side). We would have to reload the bits back into the computer and this would take a few hours. This gave us a few hours of time so that we might run our engineering problems. When the dark side student finely returned, sometimes with his student lab instructor in tow, the computer was always working again. And no, we were never caught.
Epilogue
Some of you may remember the Florida elections official a couple of elections back staring and squinting at a punch card that supposedly was a vote. Yes, those punched cards were exactly the same as the punched cards we used (and changed) so many decades ago on that IBM 1620. One could surmise that Florida was using that exact same computer--they were, after all, using the same obsolete card system. There can't be that many devices left on the planet that can actually read these cards. And if you remember the photo of that election official, with his look of concentration and extreme puzzlement as he attempted to determine if a hole was punched or not on that card--well it was the same look of puzzlement that I observed when explaining to those long ago dark side forces that the numbers were wrong because the computer experienced "digital drift" and had lost too many of its bits. In fact, I'm pretty sure I recognized this fellow--older certainly, but likely no wiser. And if he took the wrong card deck with him...
Well, now you know the rest of the story that is the only logical explanation of how he became president.
