The Computer That Ate My Brother is a children's novel by Dean Marney. Published in 1985, it is about a boy named Harry Smith who receives a computer on his twelfth birthday, only to find it has a mind of its own, flashing lights to get attention, switching itself on and off at will, and communicating using text (similar to the WOPR).
That was okay when Harry was thinking about dinner.It wasn't okay when he was thinking about his brother Roger,the worst possible slime ever to walk the face of the Earth. At the end, his brother returns, having been transformed by the experience of being warped to another dimension.
Famous quotes containing the words computer, ate and/or brother:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Isabel, Isabel, didn’t worry,
Isabel didn’t scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“A gorgeous example of denial is the story about the little girl who was notified that a baby brother or sister was on the way. She listened in thoughtful silence, then raised her gaze from her mother’s belly to her eyes and said, “Yes, but who will be the new baby’s mommy?””
—Judith Viorst (20th century)