It’s time again to halt our printing presses
And take a week away from daily stresses
To ease away with copious Xmas wine
The pressures of our daily deadline
But ‘ere we fill with too much Christmas cheer
We’ll take a quick look back through one more year
In ’97, we certainly got a treat
Content from our partners
With an upgrade of that Windows Office Suite
And copy, why dear readers we had plenty
To write about the pros and cons of NT
Hewlett-Packard could sure have done much worse
Than to buy up Verifone for web commerce
For semiconductors, IBM pulled out the stopper
Aluminum’s out, but it gets replaced with copper
Push technology, we’re told is all the rage
Will we finally see the death of the printed page?
The end is surely nigh for the Transputer
With NCs, the network is the computer
The year went at a pace, it was NonStop
For Compaq, when it went out to shop
Roel and Eckhart cooked a deal, you’ve got to hand’em
The day that Compaq went and bought itself a Tandem
But a deal is not a deal ’till ink is dry
As BT alas discovered with MCI
On the ‘Gram we must take each and every rumor
With a pinch of salt and quite a dose of humor
We dedicated several lines of text
Wondering who would Apple buy Next?
But we had to ask the Oracle who might
This year of the Apple take a bite
Little did we guess its Redmond rival
Would suddenly invest in its survival
There must have been a fair few gasps and sobs
The day the Mac mob welcomed back their own Steve Jobs
We certainly went rushing to the phones
When Apple waved goodbye to all its clones
We’ll mention here, Carlo de Benedetti
Especially since he rhymes with Olivetti
Whose troubled year ended with a bang
As it sold its Olsy business off to Wang
Back to Microsoft and its box of tricks
Project Hydra came and worried poor Citrix
Since the web is now the only place to be
Bill went shopping and came home with WebTV
To add another thoroughbred to his stable
He bought Comcast as his passport into cable
Now, lawsuits could consume most of our time
So buddy, can you spare a Novadigm?
But one at least was settled out of court
When DEC’s Alpha chip by Intel, was bought
Though Sun caused a bit of a palaver
When it sued the boys from Redmond over Java
One case overshadows all the rest
As US Justice puts Microsoft to the test
In enabling us the internet to Explore
Bill’s company may have stepped outside the law
For browsers come not just in Windows shape
As evidenced by the boys down at Netscape
All in all though, there’s been untold innovation
And much that surely merits celebration
Alas though, Computergram still counts the cost
Of Tim Palmer, who this year to us was lost
So to him, we dedicate this year’s last issue
And dear readers, you must know that we will miss you
We’d like to drink your health and bid you wait
Please hold back all your news ’till ’98!
Joanne Wallen
