Only In America . . . ^TM

A MIND OF ITS OWN

The first psychic computer has been developed by the Pidynski Computer Company and will be available next month. It will be called the DOWHIM - an acronymn for "Do WHat I Mean."

"This will be the biggest thing to hit the computer industry since the discovery of magnetism," Franklin Pidynski, inventor of the new technology, told the annual meeting of the Congress of Computer and Nuclear Think Tanks last night. "It will open up a whole new world of automation," he told the CoCoNuTT audience. "Even those people who have heretofore considered the computer to be an alien and inscrutable mechanism will now be able to create complex programs in the blink of an eye that will always work exactly the way they were meant to."

Pidynski first came up with the idea of a psychic computer seven years ago. He had just bought his son a personal computer for his birthday and was trying to teach him how to write a simple BASIC program. Every time the boy would tell the computer to do something, it would just go BEEP! and give him some obscure error message. Finally, he turned to his Dad in frustration and said, "Why can't this thing just do what I mean instead of beeping at me all the time?"

And thus the idea for DOWHIM was born.

"I had been around computers for most of my life," the elder Pidynski said, "and was familiar with most of their idiosyncracies. But I knew that most people had the same problem that Elmer did - they just wanted to do some simple thing, but were unable to make the computer do what they wanted because they didn't know all the ins and outs of programming. I figured that if I could invent a computer that would do what folks wanted it to do instead of what they thought they had told it to do, I could make a fortune."

Pidynski spent the next four years doing psychic research and traveling around the world looking for suitable materials for his new computer. "I tried everything from tea leaves and chicken bones to a magic wand and a pendelum," Pidynski said, "without finding anything that would do what I needed. I was about ready to give the whole thing up until I ran across Melinda Freestone."

Melinda, world famous astrologer and fortune teller, came up with an Ouija Keyboard and Crystal Ball Monitor to go with the pyramid-shaped CPU which Pidynski had designed for him in Egypt, and the DOWHIM was ready for production.

"The first models were a little balky," Pidynski said, "because they were designed to function with maximum efficiency when the alignment of the Moons of Jupiter best suited my personal aura. Unfortunately, this led to drastic reductions in efficiency when the machine was operated by someone born under a different astrological sign, so we had to make some adjustments before we could mass produce the DOWHIM."

Even so, the DOWHIM did not perform well when tuned for a general audience, so Pidynski had to produce a different model for each astrological sign. This means that a DOWHIM tuned for an Aries, for example, will not work properly for a Scorpio. However, Pidynski managed to turn a potential problem into a benefit by touting it as a built-in security. The DOWHIM comes in twelve different astrological models and is guaranteed to work properly only when operated by the original owner.