Title    : The Crash of the Ten and Eleven
Original : The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Group    : ?
Author   : Abe Friedman & Sarah Elizabeth Miller
Intro    : 
Song     : 

                 The Crash of the Ten and Eleven


             (to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)
            by Abe Friedman & Sarah Elizabeth Miller


     The memories live on from the Tower on down
     Of the time Jonny Day did endeavor
     To save the accounts that were scrambled or lost
     In the Crash of the Ten and Eleven.

     Does anyone know where the users can go
     When the systems are hopelessly tangled,
     When the tapes and the disks are in snarls and twists
     And the files are shredded and mangled?

     The DEC men one day came down Baltimore way
     On a routine maintenance mission.
     And when they were through everybody would rue
     The computer's down-hearted condition.

     Pity ECAS when the entire class
     Found only one block in the core.
     When anyone logged in the whole system fell in
     'Cause the Ten couldn't take any more.

     Strange the commands of the SF crazed fans
     When they came down to print out their songbook.
     The Eleven got worse with each new obscene verse
     Which brought many foul curses and long looks.

     With terrible smiles they created new files
     'Til the Eleven, it just couldn't take it.
     Though Vandelinde swore, it would process no more
     And not even Erol could make it.

     So now JHU had possession of two
     Computers that sat there and quivered.
     And so Garland called over to Barton Hall
     "From this fate we must all be delivered."

     And there Jonny Day could find nothing to say
     As his eyes gazed upward to Heaven.
     He silently prayed to be whisked far away
     From the Crash of the Ten and Eleven.

     But brave Jonny Day knew there was much work to do
     And he knew that he'd better get to it,
     For the faculty had said they would have Jonny's head
     If by lunchtime he hadn't got through it.

     So taking a look in his maintenance book
     And turning to page forty-seven
     In the hope it would tell of the magical spell
     That would cure the Ten and Eleven,

     He read of the way he could rescue the Day
     And calm the neurotic computers.
     The way to the core was a game of seawar
     With the ships all manned by superusers.

     Oh, the game that they had in the Undergrad Lab
     Is a take that's worthy of singing,
     For the echoing sound of each ship going down
     Was the bells in their Tower a-ringing.

     And so the DEC Ten, it was working again
     And, too by the graces of Heaven,
     Were the tapes and the disks that had been sorely missed
     On the E.E. Department's Eleven.

     The legend lived on from the Tower on down
     Of Jon Day and the way he endeavored
     To save the accounts that were scrambled or lost
     In the Crash of the Ten and Eleven.