Abstract :
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Batch, all access to the magical shrine Mainframe was controlled by a guild of wizards called Assemblers. They offered the machine-punched cards with the arcane symbols of their calling. Then, the monks of the benevolent orders Fortran and Cobol settled in the kingdom, and those who learned their language could actually understand what was in columns 7 through 12 of the sacrificial cards. But eventually the knights of Dartmouth, Sirs Kemeny and Kurtz, revolted against the evil card queue and let ordinary citizens submit Basic petitions to the gods through public shrines called Terminals...
