1994
SCOT is apparently an acronym for SuperComputers-on-Tay, a major manufacturer and employer in the Highlands during the early Middle Ages. Although destroyed by the Sassenachs after the battle of Culloden (a "day that still lives in infamy...") in order to promote Babbage's "Calculating Engine", traces of the early computer culture in Scotland remain and can be accessed on the Internet.
SOME EXAMPLES include Dynamic Random Access Memory: early computers in Scotland were limited by memory, typically causing systems to crash, and this led to much whisky drinking; to this day, every Scot knows instinctively what a "wee Dram" entails, but few know its derivation.....
Again the word CLAN actually corresponds to "computer-linked area network", adding considerable sophistication to the rustic concept of an extended family unit. Recently, Apple unwittingly resurrected part of the culture in its line of MacIntosh Computers.
THE BABBAGE CONSPIRACY did not completely destroy computer culture in Scotland, and vestiges of the network were maintained in obscure University towns, including Dumfries and Oban, where one, apparently, was used by a young poet Robert Burns. I have been able to recover a fragment of one of his poems from Cyberspace and am able to present it to you this evening. Parenthetically, Burns was not particularly computer-literate and, as we see from the tone of the verses, was both impatient and, of course, over-sexed.
To a Mouse: On trying to log onto Internet via Modem to the Scottish National University microVax cluster, November 1785.