Do computers hate humans?

“Never anthropomorphize computers; they hate that.”

We all like to joke that computers hate us. Some people find it impossible to operate a computer without it breaking down. I tease one of the scientists at work about it because technology is like water to his oil. Or is it a snake to his mongoose? Technically speaking, computers are just electrons zooming around physical pathways that we create. They have no feelings and they certainly don’t hold grudges.

Or do they?

During my freshman year of college, we discovered that the mainframe didn’t seem to like one particular student. In FORTRAN class, we all entered the same code into our terminals which was executed by the same computer, but for some reason Brian’s code always returned an error while everyone else’s code ran fine. Brian entered his code again (it was a simple program; a glorified “Hello, world!”) and consistently got the same bogus results.

So we got empirical on it. First we had Brian enter the code on a different terminal. Error. Then, back at his original terminal, we had someone else enter the same code under their account. Success. That eliminated the terminal as the issue. At this point the professor was involved and expressed a very keen interest in how it would turn out.

The next experiment was to use Brian’s terminal and logged in using his account. Another student typed in the code, but Brian entered the ‘execute’ command and hit enter. Error. We repeated the experiment but had a third student enter the execute command and hit enter. Success. By now the entire class was hovered around Brian’s terminal, looking over his shoulder like spectators watching a close game of hockey.

Through a process of elimination, we removed the terminal and the user account as a factor. We verified the code was being entered exactly the same every time (it was only three lines of code). Changing only one factor at a time, we narrowed everything down to the human element.

The last experiment involved one student typing in the code, a second student typing in the ‘execute’ command, and Brian simply pressing the ENTER key to run it.

Error.

Repeat and have the prof press the ENTER key.

Success.

The mainframe didn’t like Brian. I think he changed his major.