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)
“I allude to these facts to show that, so far from the Supper being a tradition in which men are fully agreed, there has always been the widest room for difference of opinion upon this particular. Having recently given particular attention to this subject, I was led to the conclusion that Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples; and further, to the opinion that it is not expedient to celebrate it as we do.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five
thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from
anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I
could completely imagine his suffering and I replied
that five thousand Chinamen was something I could not
imagine and so it was not interesting. One has to
remember that about imagination, that is when the
world gets dull when everybody does not know what
they can or what they cannot really imagine.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)