Hogfather

54

The present incarnation of Hex has a lot of in-jokes about modern (mid-90s) personal computers.

The computer business is littered with TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), such as CPU, RAM, VDU, FTP; Hex has its CWL (clothes wringer from the laundry), FTB (fluffy teddy bear), GBL (great big lever). “Small religious pictures” are icons, and they are used with a mouse. Ram skulls are an echo of RAM (random-access memory).

The beehive long-term storage is a little more obscure, but in the 1980s some mainframes had a mass storage system that involved data stored on tapes wound onto cylinders. The cylinders of tape were stored in a set of hexagonal pigeon holes, and retrieved automatically by the computer as needed; systems diagrams always depicted this part of the computer as a honeycomb pattern. And then there’s of course the fact that ‘beehive’ rhymes with ‘B-drive’, which is how one usually refers to the secondary floppy drive in a personal computer.

Interestingly, Douglas R. Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid contains a chapter in which one of the characters (the Anteater) describes how an anthill can be viewed as a brain, in which the movements of ants are the thoughts of the heap.