During some of the times in which my mind endlessly wonders, I go back to thinking about the strange horrors that lie inside and beyond the office of professor G.C., teaching the Operating Systems course for the Computer Science curriculum at my university, and I think how those are something I should write about. However, I kinda feel like the whole thing requires a really big post on its own, because the context is spicy at best and terrifying at worse...

So, instead, for this article I'm focusing on just one small (not physically, though) detail of the ominous office: inside a framed, hanged on the wall just to the back-right of his seating, a poster he had kept there for God-knows how many years, and which I have to say honestly feels appropriate for the teacher-character in question (trust me, you should have seen his crazy lectures): "Murphy’s Computer Law".

The Poster in all its essence

Unlike this article's content, the poster is very big. Seen in person, it's imponent, and it's one of the first objects of office paraphernalia that the eyes end up resting on. It's kind of unusual, though, with such a lot of text on a single page appearing to be roughly the size of an A2 paper sheet; in fact, the text on it is so dense that it's hard to read from further than half a meter away (in fact, it's also near impossible to read from a smartphone without zooming in), meaning I was never able to read it in it's entirety, in those moments of thick tension inside the place. But it's all very interesting nonetheless.

In essence, as I can gather from articles on the web such as "The Trip Thus Far: Murphy’s Computer Law", this poster was created by Tony Bove (that's the author of the linked post!) and Cheryl Rhodes, two CS-related writers, in 1984 (literally 1984...). With a typewriter font it prominently presents, just before a whole bunch of densely-packed quotes in the same style but from various other (still CS-related, I guess) people of the time, a 2-point declination of Murphy's Law to the field of computers:

1. Murphy Never Would Have Used One
2. Murphy Would Have Loved Them

I obviously couldn't get any right instant to shoot a picture of the memento in the office, but luckily the Internet offers some at a sufficiently high definition. The one I uploaded here is shamelessly taken from an eBay listing, "Murphys Computer Law Poster Original Vintage Coding Science Computers Coder 1984", which is selling this poster for just a single buckaroo.

I can't really pinpoint if this poster is actually rare or not, but for sure it's a collector item, so it's absolutely understandable that the professor displays it with such pride in his man-cave. Also, in some photos online, the strangely-placed stripes — which, by the way, trigger me terribly, as they aren't at all aligned with any of the text, and honestly this detail makes the poster appear cheaply-designed for me — seem to be of a more vibrant cyan, compared to the picture I attached here and to how my professor's copy was: very yellowed. But that's just the nature of the paper.

It's very funny, I guess, because most of the things said there hold absolutely true even 41 years later; at its core, computing really hasn't changes since then. Having to transcribe the entire manifesto would be less amusing, however, which is why I'm pleased to see that someone had already done so on the net, about a decade ago: the blogger over at Panopticon Central, which I invite you to visit in case you want to get the neatly-digitized text: https://www.panopticoncentral.net/2010/08/01/murphys-computer-law/.

Sadly, now there's really no time for me to comment all that's said on the poster, since I want to avoid this post also getting stuck in draft hell like others. Maybe that will be for another time. In the meantime, you can at least read what redditors (ugh...) have to say about this funky object, over at https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/5h8kte/murphys_computer_laws_old_poster_from_the_80s_my/. Goodbye, then, before Murphy's Law screws me this time too!