Goodbye World

Once upon a time --

A young boy attended an elite Jesuit academy where the priests taught computer programming to the children right alongside more traditional subjects of religion and Latin. On the first day of class, the boy told the teacher that he already knew how to program and asked if he could learn something else. The teacher did not believe the boy -- remember! This was Once Upon a Time, before everyone even knew a little CSS -- and forced him to stay at his computer station and learn how to make a simple program that would output

"Hello World"

in glowing green sans-serif on the duotone monitor. The boy was a good child, not at all insubordinate, but since he was a good child he was also an honorable child and he could not live with the teacher believing that he had lied. He knew he had to to prove himself to the teacher without being insolent. He was as clever as he was good, so he immediately realized that he could prove himself without disrupting his classmates by making a few improvements to the "Hello World" assignment.

When the teacher came back to check his work, the boy ran his program. The background color of the monitor changed from black to green and the program output, in glowing black sans-serif:

Goodbye World

and then the computer restarted.

For the rest of the school term the boy spent that class period playing computer games. He could have spent the time writing computer games, but it didn't occur to his teacher to give him more difficult assignments. And that's the real tragedy of the story.