The Banana Junior 6000 was the computer of child hacker Oliver Wendell Jones in Bloom County. The anthropomorphized computer, which was the second model we see Oliver Wendell Jones using, was a character for perhaps a year in the strip.

The computer looked like a Macintosh Classic, besides being bright yellow, and having feet and arms. He was equipped with 450 K of RAM, which seemed to be enough to allow him to engage in speech, cognition and locomotion, as well as some deep philosophizing and misbehavior. He was not only Jones' tool in various hacking and cracking adventures, but was prone to actually encouraging him towards new ventures. He and Jones had some disagreements, over such matters as Dan Rather's divinity. In the end, the Banana Junior had to go where all obsolete computers go.

I remember reading the collections of Bloom County strips that were released in the late 80s and early 90s, and not realizing exactly how much a fantasy creation a computer was. Before I owned a computer, the idea that a computer could talk back to me seemed to be not a total exageration.


This node submitted for Robot Week 2003.

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