Does not compute – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 8

The cool kids say it, and Barney says it to Betty, repeatedly, in intimate moments.

Anyway, the Professor almost expected that the clues they managed to unearth wouldn’t provide enough data for his electronic brain to analyze. After all, he managed to fit all of the information onto a single punchcard – typically, his elctronic brain requires ten to eleven punchcards full of information before it comes up with any sort of useful analysis. Well, that’s what the Professor assumes, at least – he’s never managed to feed it more than nine cards, and it’s never come up with anything useful, so the obvious conclusion is that it would take one or two cards more, isn’t it?

You might think it’s odd that someone like Dr. Dutchman Fu would use a set of equipment that is…how to put it…not entirely at the cuttiest part of the cutting edge of technology. But study the device’s behavior carefully: it has too little data to compute, and what does it do? Basically nothing. Most other B-movie computers would either explode, taking the whole building with them, or develop consciousness and try to take over the world. If you’re living in a B-movie world, and you manage to get your hands on a computer that’s neither explosive nor megalomanic, you’ll hang on to it for as long as it works. There’s no telling whether the world will survive the next new system you get. ._.

More on Thursday.

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