TITLE The BAPPER By Hart
PANEL 1 (BAPPER waves happily at the reader with a scruffy beard, skull t-shirt, and backwards baseball cap) BAPPER: Hi, I'm Bapper... among other things I work as a lab tech for CSU Chico's ECT department. "What other things?" you might ask... Well, you know, the odd job here and there...
PANEL 2 (A nerdy corporate tech CEO-type is tied to a chair with a band of explosive charges wired to a nearby computer. He looks nervously at the CRT monitor with a large WINDOWS ARE KEEN sticker on the side) BAPPER: Case in point... I present to you my good friend Bill... When Bill woke up this morning, he found himself hooked up to a very peculiar rig... A bomb hooked up to two special pieces of software only I know how to uninstall. BILL: Gulp
PANEL 3 (The CRT monitor displays two overlapping dialog boxes. The one in the foreground has a DETONATE progress bar that is more than half full, and the one in the background has a DISARM progress bar that is less than a quarter full.) BAPPER: The first program is set to detonate the bomb once it has reached exactly sixty seconds of CPU time... The second is set to disarm it after thirty seconds of CPU time.
PANEL 4 (Close-up on Bill's eyes as his beady eyes stare through his thick glasses with fear) BAPPER: One might expect that the bomb would be disarmed long enough before it would be detonated... BUT ...what's this..? Bill is running Windows 95... Tsk tsk... that's too bad... because, as everybody knows, Win95 does not provide true pre-emptive multitasking...and the detonator's running in the foreground. It'll give up the CPU when it's good and ready... which should be right about...
PANEL 5 (An explosion erupts within a gated estate as Bapper shields his eyes from light nearby) SFX: KA-BOOM BAPPER: ...now.
PANEL 6 (Bapper grins as he holds up a sheet of paper) BAPPER: Sorry, Bill...it had to be done. So, who's next on the list..? Ah... that tallish HELPDESK FREAK..! Ah... a tech's work is never done...
CREDITS BAPPER (c) 1995 Bapper
Commentary
I drew this as a birthday present for a friend of mine at Chico State who would go on to make quite a few appearances over the years. The real Bapper isn't too far off from this caricature, though to my knowledge he hasn't actually exacted cartoon violence on anyone.
The "joke" here is that Windows 95, still hot off the presses after a massively successful launch, was way behind the "modern" UNIX-based operating systems we were using in the Chico State computer labs. UNIX was actually rather ancient but it already had strong multitasking that was better at keeping malicious processes from hogging the CPU. Windows 95's multitasking was an improvement over Windows 3.1, but a lot of the same problems lurked under that shiny new coat of paint.
It's funny to think about what mattered to us when we were budding computer science students. It seemed criminal that a company like Microsoft could get away with - much less make a fortune - selling an OS that was so obviously cobbled together and filled with horrifying compromises. Little did we know that "cobbled together" and "horrifying compromises" were the official motto of the industry we were gearing up to enter. In the ensuing years, I've looked into the history of many of these compromises and have a greater respect for the people behind the code. It was still buggy as all hell but now I think they were justified in a lot of cases.
Of course, this is all to say nothing of the Free vs Commercial Software debate that was raging in the mid-1990s as Linux crept into view...