Now IBM Falls to Unsaintly Comic

As if International Business Machines didn’t have enough troubles, now it’s fodder for “St. Silicon,” the unofficial patron of the computer world. Saints are supposed to be charitable, but this guy insists on calling bureaucracy-bound IBM “the Unified team.”

Like any good saint, though, Silicon is just. Picking on Microsoft, he claims that the latest release of DOS--the personal computer operating system that has bedeviled users for years--is DOS Perot; you load it and it runs for awhile, quits, then runs again. As for Microsoft Windows, he figures that it got its name because “it’s a pain to use.”

With his biting one-liners and ear to the central processing unit for gossip, St. Silicon (otherwise known as Jeff Armstrong) of Santa Cruz keeps computer trade shows and users’ groups in stitches with what he describes as the world’s first user-friendly religion, the Church of Heuristic Information Processing (CHIP).

Its first miracle?

Says the 46-year-old comic: “I make a living at this.”