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)
“Baltimore lay very near the immense protein factory of Chesapeake Bay, and out of the bay it ate divinely. I well recall the time when prime hard crabs of the channel species, blue in color, at least eight inches in length along the shell, and with snow-white meat almost as firm as soap, were hawked in Hollins Street of Summer mornings at ten cents a dozen.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“—My brother Toby, quoth she, is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman. “Then he will never,” quoth my father, “be able to lie diagonally in his bed again as long as he lives.””
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)