This joke made a little more sense when it was written in 1991. I was poking some fun at the mainframe company I worked for. They were making impressive progress on fast processors and lots of us were joking about how fast they were.
At the time, this was only posted inside the company on a humor mail list.
It was a typical Monday - nobody was getting much work done. And maybe just as well...Not long after we got back from lunch, the building shook and a loud roar could be heard echoing back and Forth across the valley. At first I thought it was an earthquake, but the noise was much too loud for that. Before we even had a chance to come to our own conclusions, my next-office neighbor, Ada, jumped out into the hallway and said, "That noise was an explosion at headquarters! I was on the phone with a system operator over there when it happenned. I'm going over there to see if they need any help." Without hesitation, all 15 of us that had been chatting in the hallway came along. It gave us something to do.
Headquarters was a few blocks away. But these are big blocks so that's in the next city. Indeed, there had been some sort of an explosion in our Processor and Systems Computer Architecture Lab (PASCAL). All the windows were broken... outward. Some small reusable objects from the roof were scattered around the lawn. Other than that, the structure was fine. But, no one dared approach the building - all the people who had authorization to enter had been inside it at the time of the explosion.
It came as no surprise that the Murky News reporters got there before we did. A moment later, two engineers emerged from the front doors uninjured and smiling. A reporter, with all the Smalltalk the media is known for, asked, "What does this mean for the future of your company's high-speed processor development?" The engineers looked at each other and then back at the reporter, "Didn't you hear it?! It broke the sound barrier!"
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