Dr. Dobb's Journal September 1997
The second Saturday of the month is "Battle of the Bands" night at Foo Bar, the late-night retreat of the Silicon Valley elite where I moonlight as relief bartender. On this particular Saturday, there was a large contingent from the Pacific Northwest. As I scrambled to fill orders, Seattle punk band Embrace and Extend took the stage, opening with a favorite from a few years back:
Here we are now, entertain us,
Keep us captive, and contain us,
Multimedia's what we need 'cause --
We forget why, so just feed us,
Pour it on like molten lava,
ActiveX is just like Java...
Embrace and Extend was followed by the band All's Phair, made up of Microsoft marketing staffers:
It was four AM and the light was gray
Like it always is at Microsoft
He asked is 95 the year released
I said that it meant that once but it was target marketshare after that...
...and John Messagebox:
And everything feels so complete
When you right-click on the beat
And the Win catches your feet
And the icon's flying, flying...
Or maybe he said caches your FAT. Or fetches your cat, I don't know. My hearing was already starting to go. Then, unbelievably, the volume ratcheted up another notch as Screamin' Steven and the Winners rocked the rafters with a Lou Reed-influenced number:
Little Bill never once gave it away,
Developer, end user, all have to pay.
A site license here and a royalty there
At Microsoft we own the air and we say,
Hey baby, take a walk on the Win side,
Say hey honey, got a lock on the Win side.
And the coloured girls go, COM DCOM...
...and so the long night shambled on, with a steady stream of singers from the same soggy zip code. Over a chorus of "COM-a, COM-a, COM-a, COM on," I wondered aloud to regular customer Larry Wilde whether local musicians were going to make a showing at all. It looked like a Northwest night.
It was at just that moment that my cousin Corbett burst through the door, leading his group, the CORBettes. They were something to see with their big hair and sequins and applets on their shoulders. After more fussing with the equipment than you see at a tradeshow demo, the CORBettes launched into a Motown-inspired number:
I need ORBs, ORBs to call my own
I need to break free from IUunknown
But mama said, You can't have no ORBs
Till the OMG's through
She said ORBs don't come easy
It's a game of RFQ
How long must I wait with my code in my hand
For a real component infrastructure plan
My code can't bear to live undistributed
It grows impatient for an object-savvy net
But as I wait here for, for that object bus
These precious words keep me from going nuts
I remember mama said...
Well, I wasn't that impressed, but the audience apparently was. It was no contest. When I checked the applause meter, the obvious was made official -- the CORBettes had won the Battle of the Bands by a large margin. What still isn't clear to me is: Was this a pure musical judgment, or was it a Silicon Valley bias for CORBA over COM/DCOM? Or was it Corbett's legs?
We may never know.
--Michael Swaine