And lo! The Lord of the OS did come down among His sheep and He sayeth, "Thou shalt pay Bill Gates and he will deliver unto you my product. I am your WinXP, your GUI. Thou shalt not have false GUI's on machines before me."

And the Lord said, "16-bit applications are evil! I am sorry, I ever created them. I shall smite them with my RAM rod and start all over. Thou shalt buy new computers."

And the prophet Intel came forward and said, "But Lord, what about backward compatibility? What about the tribes of the 8086 and the 80386 ?"

And, lo, the Lord became angry and said, "Compatibility is irrevelant. Thou shalt be assimilated."

And the consumers gathered around Bill Gates and the Tower of Microsoft, and they asked, "Prophet, how much must we spend on salvation? Seven times our investment?"

And Bill Gates turned to the crowd and said unto them, "Nay, consumers, not seven but seventy times seven times your investment. Only then shall you be saved."

And the consumers did as they were told. But the product did not work and they grew angry, and they cried out to the Lord, "Lord, we have done as your prophet asked us to do, but the product does not work! Our machines, they run slow! Our applications, they do not run."

And the Lord sayeth unto them, "I tell you this, it is easier for Alice Cooper to enter the Gates of Heaven than for a Pentium to run Windows 95."

And as the masses did come forward, I saw inscribed upon their heads W95, the number of the Bill.

And the Prophet Bill, for that was who it must have been, he raiseth his right hand and broke the first seal, saying "Behold the seal of Microsoft. By the braking of this seal you are bound unto whatever the contract within may say."

And as the seal was broken, all the great empires around the world were set upon with famine and floods and swarms of bugs like never seen before and the great anguish befell them all.

And lo, the Prophet Bill held up the scroll and said, "Behold, the second seal! I shall not break it today, but rather I shall break it soon, like perhaps next week, or maybe the week after. Thou shalt wait expectantly for its breaking, and shall not produce any work until that time shall come."