A young guy from North Dakota moves to Florida and goes to a big "everything under one roof" store looking for a job.
The Manager says, "Do you have any sales experience?" The young guy says "Yeah. I was a vacuum salesman back in North Dakota."
Well, the boss was unsure, but he liked the kid and figured he'd give him a shot, so he gave him the job.
"You start tomorrow. I'll come down after we close and see how you did."
His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down to the sales floor.
"How many customers bought something from you today?" The kid frowns and looks at the floor and mutters, "One". The boss says "Just one? Our sales people average sales to 25 to 30 customers a day.
This is gonna have to change very soon if you'd like to continue your employment here. We have very strict standards for our sales force here in Florida. One sale a day might have been acceptable in North Dakota, but you're not on the farm anymore, son."
The kid took his beating, but continued to look at his shoes, so the boss felt kinda bad for chewing him out on his first day. He asked (sarcastically), "So, how much was your one sale for?"
The kid looks up at his boss and says "$124,548.88".
The boss, astonished, says $124,548.88??? What the heck did you sell?"
The kid says, "Well, first, I sold him some new fish hooks. Then I sold him a new fishing rod to go with his new hooks. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn't think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4x4 Chevrolet Suburban."
The boss said "A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and a SUV???"
The kid said "No, the guy came in here to buy tampons for his wife, and I said, 'Bro, your weekend's a mess, you should go fishing.
In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was a zero; nothing. On the first day, He toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and "active low" signals didn't yet exist.) On the second day, God's boss wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn't. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day ( and his first all-nighter ) reconstructing the universe. On the third day, the bit cried "Oh, Lord! If you exist, give me a sign!" And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realized the the "new and improved" wouldn't do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit, or the Sign bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honored. On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with 'add' and 'logical shift' instructions. And the original bit discovered that by performing a single shift instruction, it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the importance of computer security. On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU, with wonderful features, and said "Sсrеw that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply." And God saw that it was good. On the sixth day, God got a bit overconfident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimizing compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays. Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday. On the seventh day, an engineering change introduced UNIX into the Universe, and it hasn't worked right since.