Hex (Discworld)
Encyclopedia
Hex is a fictional computer featuring in the Discworld
novels by Terry Pratchett
. First appearing in Soul Music, Hex is an elaborate, magic-powered and self-building computer housed at the Unseen University
(UU) in the city of Ankh-Morpork
Hex is a computer unlike any other the Disc
has ever seen (which is not particularly hard since previously all other "computers" on the Disc had consisted of druidic stone circles). Programmed via 'Softlore', Hex runs and evolves under the watchful eyes of wizard Ponder Stibbons, who becomes the de-facto IT
manager at UU because he's the only one who understands what he's talking about.
s. The wizards could then use punched card
s to control which tubes the ants could crawl through, enabling it to perform simple mathematical functions.
By the time of the next novel, Interesting Times
, Hex had become a lot more complex, and was constantly reinventing itself. Part of it is now clockwork
, which interfaces with the ant-farm via a paternoster
the ants can ride on that turns a significant cogwheel. Its main purposes were to analyse spells, to see if there were simpler "meta-spells" underlying them, and to help Stibbons with his study of "invisible writings", by running the spells used to bring the writings into existence (these spells must be cast rapidly, and each one can only be used once before the universe notices they shouldn't work). In other words, data compression
and information retrieval
.
In Hogfather
Hex contained several things that nobody remembered installing, and was asking about electricity
. It was at around this time that the wizards become concerned that it may be trying to become something they didn't understand.
By The Science of Discworld
Hex was capable of "once and future computing;" increasing its abilities simply by deducing that the required processing power would exist eventually. Presumably this requires a high expenditure of magic, as it has not been mentioned again, (at the time, there was a massive excess of magic available due to a near catastrophic overload of the university's experimental thaumic reactor.) This virtual memory
appeared as translucent silver towers superimposed onto the real Hex. Hex was sufficiently intelligent by this time not to tell the wizards what it was doing, in case it worried them.
By Unseen Academicals
, Ponder Stibbons has placed a mask on the wall to communicate with, even though Hex's voice seems to come from everywhere as it travels in blit space, (although Ponder comments "somehow, well, it feels better to have something to talk to.")
By the time of The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
Stibbons had hooked it up to the University's clacks tower, and it worked out all the codes, meaning the University can now use the clacks for free, and has the Disc's first modem
. (The legal issues have been carefully considered by Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, who concluded that 'no-one was going to find out, so they may as well do as they please'.) It is, however, debatable whether-or-not the Patrician, Lord Havelock Vetinari, knows.
In The Art of Discworld
, Pratchett explains that "the wizards invented something sufficiently computer-like that computerness entered into it."
s in the system). This is a reference to Douglas Hofstadter
's Gödel, Escher, Bach
in which there exists a sentient ant colony, with the ants acting as neurons. Hex can now be given input through a huge wooden keyboard, in analogue writing by means of a complicated mechanical eye designed by Hex itself, or vocally through an old hearing trumpet, and gives output
by means of a series of wooden blocks and later a quill on a hinged lever (echoing the real-world evolution of computer output from paper tape to video monitor).
It is all powered by a waterwheel covered in male sheep skulls, (in other words, RAM.) When it is particularly busy, an hourglass
comes down on a spring—another sideways reference to Windows
. Another apparently important feature is an aquarium
, so the operator has something to watch when Hex is working, (Hex's screensaver
.) Hex's long-term memory storage is a massive beehive contained in the next room. The presence of the bees makes this secure memory, because attempting to tamper with it would result in being "stung to death," (quoted from Hogfather
) As a further advantage, when Hex is turned off for the summer, the beehive will provide quite a lot of honey.
There is also a mouse
,(a possible reference to a "computer mouse,") that has built its nest in the middle of Hex. It doesn't seem to do anything, but Hex stops working if it is removed, or if Ponder forgets to feed it cheese, (also from Hogfather
.) Hex also stops working, (with the error message "Mine! Waah!") if the FTB is removed/disengaged. "FTB" stands for "Fluffy Teddy Bear," and it was Hex's Hogswatchnight gift from the Hogfather. It is said to believe in the Hogfather, because it was told to do so by Death
in Hogfather. The FTB may be a reference to the Jdbgmgr.exe
file found in windows operating systems which had a teddy bear as its icon. FTB may also be a play, or pun, on the existing File Transfer Protocol, (FTP,) which can be used to transfer large chunks of binary data between computers. Stibbons is concerned by these signs that Hex might be alive, but dismisses these thoughts, insisting that Hex only thinks it is alive.
Hex can apparently be shut down completely by means of a Big Red Lever
. This seems to worry it, further indicating sentient life because it is afraid of death
. An example of this is shown in Hogfather
where, when Death approaches Hex, it asks if it is "Big Red Lever time?"
, another Hex-like machine has been invented by the smaller magical university of Braseneck College. This is much simpler than the original, however; according to Stibbons, Hex is technically a Very Big Thing, while the Braseneck device is barely a Quite Big Thing (the next step up would be a Great Big Thing, every particle of the universe being modelled within it; apparently these terms are quite exact, as when the Lecturer in Recent Runes postulated that the Braseneck wizards would try and build an Even Bigger Thing, Ponder Stibbons corrected him. Apparently a Very Big Thing is capable of pushing boundaries twice as big up to three times as far as a Quite Big Thing).
The Hex-like machine was mentioned again in Unseen Academicals
, as constructed by the staff of the Higher Energy Magic Building at Braseneck college, and was given the name Pex. Pex was apparently powered by chickens rather than ants, a technology which was considered superior as the eggs it provided were edible. Adrian Turnipseed was responsible for its construction and maintenance, using various technologies he had learned from Ponder while helping to build the original Hex. However, he had apparently not learned well enough, as a seventy-foot chicken broke out of the Higher Energy Magic Building and demolished much of Pseudopolis—and presumably Pex as well.
employees, turning up in real-word systems
and in programming books.
It alludes to the many confusing error messages that technology users have had to put up with in the Information Age
. "Out of Paper" (also seen as "PC LOAD LETTER
" for some printers) is familiar to many office workers. "Redo From Start" was the somewhat unhelpful error message produced by the BASIC
interpreter
in many early home computers when non-numeric characters were entered in response to a prompt for numerical input. Other inscrutable Hex-talk includes:
+++Mr. Jelly! Mr. Jelly!+++
+++Error at Address Number 14, Treacle Mine Road.+++
+++Melon melon melon+++
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++
+++Oneoneoneoneoneoneone+++
Hex's messages are often delimited by the sequence +++, which recalls the escape sequence
in the Hayes command set
, a standard used in dial-up modem
s.
In the PlayStation game Discworld II: Missing, Presumed..., if the player asks the question "Why?", Hex spits out various error messages different from those in the books:
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* End of Cheese Error
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Can Not Find Drive Z:
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Unknown Application Error
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Please Reboot Universe
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Year Of The Sloth *Blip* *Blip* *Blip*
This echoes the science-fiction "does not compute
" cliché
, in which the protagonist confuses, locks up, or destroys a dangerous computer by giving it riddles or making paradoxical statements, like: "Everything I say is a lie."
, Soul Music (novel), Hogfather
, The Last Continent
, Going Postal
, The Science of Discworld
I, II and III, Making Money
and Unseen Academicals
and in the video game Discworld II: Missing Presumed...!?
s), came from Pratchett's own early experiments with unfathomable upgrades on his ZX-81.
The name is a play on two meanings of the word "hex": a hex can be a "magical spell", but it is also number of ants legs - HEX equal 6 in greece. The ants are powering the HEX! Also, hex is often used as slang for hexadecimal, the base 16 system used in several programming languages.
In 2001, a new Silicon Graphics
Origin 2800 supercomputer was installed as part of the University of Leicester
's Centre for Mathematical Modelling and, with Pratchett's blessing, named HEX.
Discworld
Discworld is a comic fantasy book series by English author Sir Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A'Tuin. The books frequently parody, or at least take inspiration from, J. R. R....
novels by Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels...
. First appearing in Soul Music, Hex is an elaborate, magic-powered and self-building computer housed at the Unseen University
Unseen University
The Unseen University is a school of wizardry in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. Located in the city of Ankh-Morpork, the UU is staffed by a faculty composed of mostly indolent and inept old wizards. The university's name is a pun on the Invisible College...
(UU) in the city of Ankh-Morpork
Ankh-Morpork
Ankh-Morpork is a fictional city-state which prominently features in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series of fantasy novels. As cities go, it is on the far side of corrupt and polluted, and is subject to outbreaks of comedic violence and brouhaha on a fairly regular basis...
Hex is a computer unlike any other the Disc
Discworld (world)
The Discworld is the fictional setting for all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels. It consists of a large disc resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle, named Great A'Tuin as it slowly swims...
has ever seen (which is not particularly hard since previously all other "computers" on the Disc had consisted of druidic stone circles). Programmed via 'Softlore', Hex runs and evolves under the watchful eyes of wizard Ponder Stibbons, who becomes the de-facto IT
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
manager at UU because he's the only one who understands what he's talking about.
Origins and evolution
Hex has its origins in a device that briefly appeared in Soul Music, created by Ponder Stibbons and some student Wizards in the High Energy Magic building. In this form it was simply a complex network of glass tubes, containing antAnt
Ants are social insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors in the mid-Cretaceous period between 110 and 130 million years ago and diversified after the rise of flowering plants. More than...
s. The wizards could then use punched card
Punched card
A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
s to control which tubes the ants could crawl through, enabling it to perform simple mathematical functions.
By the time of the next novel, Interesting Times
Interesting Times
Interesting Times is the seventeenth novel in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.The opening lines explain that the title refers to the phrase "may you live in interesting times".-Plot summary:...
, Hex had become a lot more complex, and was constantly reinventing itself. Part of it is now clockwork
Clockwork
A clockwork is the inner workings of either a mechanical clock or a device that operates in a similar fashion. Specifically, the term refers to a mechanical device utilizing a complex series of gears....
, which interfaces with the ant-farm via a paternoster
Paternoster
A paternoster or paternoster lift is a passenger elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers can step on or off at any floor they like...
the ants can ride on that turns a significant cogwheel. Its main purposes were to analyse spells, to see if there were simpler "meta-spells" underlying them, and to help Stibbons with his study of "invisible writings", by running the spells used to bring the writings into existence (these spells must be cast rapidly, and each one can only be used once before the universe notices they shouldn't work). In other words, data compression
Data compression
In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....
and information retrieval
Information retrieval
Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
.
In Hogfather
Hogfather
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a 1997 British Fantasy Award nominee.The Hogfather is also a character in the book, representing something akin to Father Christmas. He grants children's wishes on Hogswatchnight and brings them presents...
Hex contained several things that nobody remembered installing, and was asking about electricity
Electricity
Electricity is a general term encompassing a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. These include many easily recognizable phenomena, such as lightning, static electricity, and the flow of electrical current in an electrical wire...
. It was at around this time that the wizards become concerned that it may be trying to become something they didn't understand.
By The Science of Discworld
The Science of Discworld
The Science of Discworld is a 1999 book by novelist Terry Pratchett and popular science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Two sequels, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe and The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, have been written by the same authors.The book alternates between a...
Hex was capable of "once and future computing;" increasing its abilities simply by deducing that the required processing power would exist eventually. Presumably this requires a high expenditure of magic, as it has not been mentioned again, (at the time, there was a massive excess of magic available due to a near catastrophic overload of the university's experimental thaumic reactor.) This virtual memory
Virtual memory
In computing, virtual memory is a memory management technique developed for multitasking kernels. This technique virtualizes a computer architecture's various forms of computer data storage , allowing a program to be designed as though there is only one kind of memory, "virtual" memory, which...
appeared as translucent silver towers superimposed onto the real Hex. Hex was sufficiently intelligent by this time not to tell the wizards what it was doing, in case it worried them.
By Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals is the 37th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The novel satirises football , and features Mustrum Ridcully setting up an Unseen University football team, with the Librarian in goal. It includes new details about "below stairs" life at the university...
, Ponder Stibbons has placed a mask on the wall to communicate with, even though Hex's voice seems to come from everywhere as it travels in blit space, (although Ponder comments "somehow, well, it feels better to have something to talk to.")
By the time of The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe is a 2002 book written by the novelist Terry Pratchett and the popular science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen...
Stibbons had hooked it up to the University's clacks tower, and it worked out all the codes, meaning the University can now use the clacks for free, and has the Disc's first modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
. (The legal issues have been carefully considered by Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, who concluded that 'no-one was going to find out, so they may as well do as they please'.) It is, however, debatable whether-or-not the Patrician, Lord Havelock Vetinari, knows.
In The Art of Discworld
The Art of Discworld
The Art of Discworld is a descriptive book of the world of the Discworld as portrayed in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It showcases the art of Paul Kidby with descriptions of characters and locations by Pratchett and some details of the development of the art by Kidby himself.The book...
, Pratchett explains that "the wizards invented something sufficiently computer-like that computerness entered into it."
Structure and technology
Currently, Hex is activated by "initializing the GBL," which Stibbons reluctantly admits means "pulling the Great Big Lever," (similar to the Internet slang "BRS", or "big red switch.") This releases millions of ants into a much more complex network of glass tubes that makes up the bulk of Hex; hence the sticker on Hex that reads "Anthill inside", a pun on Intel's ad slogan "Intel Inside". Hex "thinks" by controlling which tubes the ants can crawl through, thus allowing it to perform increasingly complex computations if enough ants are provided (that is, if there are enough bugSoftware bug
A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's...
s in the system). This is a reference to Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
's Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll"....
in which there exists a sentient ant colony, with the ants acting as neurons. Hex can now be given input through a huge wooden keyboard, in analogue writing by means of a complicated mechanical eye designed by Hex itself, or vocally through an old hearing trumpet, and gives output
Output
Output is the term denoting either an exit or changes which exit a system and which activate/modify a process. It is an abstract concept, used in the modeling, system design and system exploitation.-In control theory:...
by means of a series of wooden blocks and later a quill on a hinged lever (echoing the real-world evolution of computer output from paper tape to video monitor).
It is all powered by a waterwheel covered in male sheep skulls, (in other words, RAM.) When it is particularly busy, an hourglass
Hourglass
An hourglass measures the passage of a few minutes or an hour of time. It has two connected vertical glass bulbs allowing a regulated trickle of material from the top to the bottom. Once the top bulb is empty, it can be inverted to begin timing again. The name hourglass comes from historically...
comes down on a spring—another sideways reference to Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. Another apparently important feature is an aquarium
Aquarium
An aquarium is a vivarium consisting of at least one transparent side in which water-dwelling plants or animals are kept. Fishkeepers use aquaria to keep fish, invertebrates, amphibians, marine mammals, turtles, and aquatic plants...
, so the operator has something to watch when Hex is working, (Hex's screensaver
Screensaver
A screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT and plasma computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer is not in use...
.) Hex's long-term memory storage is a massive beehive contained in the next room. The presence of the bees makes this secure memory, because attempting to tamper with it would result in being "stung to death," (quoted from Hogfather
Hogfather
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a 1997 British Fantasy Award nominee.The Hogfather is also a character in the book, representing something akin to Father Christmas. He grants children's wishes on Hogswatchnight and brings them presents...
) As a further advantage, when Hex is turned off for the summer, the beehive will provide quite a lot of honey.
There is also a mouse
Mouse
A mouse is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse . It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. This rodent is eaten by large birds such as hawks and eagles...
,(a possible reference to a "computer mouse,") that has built its nest in the middle of Hex. It doesn't seem to do anything, but Hex stops working if it is removed, or if Ponder forgets to feed it cheese, (also from Hogfather
Hogfather
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a 1997 British Fantasy Award nominee.The Hogfather is also a character in the book, representing something akin to Father Christmas. He grants children's wishes on Hogswatchnight and brings them presents...
.) Hex also stops working, (with the error message "Mine! Waah!") if the FTB is removed/disengaged. "FTB" stands for "Fluffy Teddy Bear," and it was Hex's Hogswatchnight gift from the Hogfather. It is said to believe in the Hogfather, because it was told to do so by Death
Death (Discworld)
Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton usually carrying a scythe...
in Hogfather. The FTB may be a reference to the Jdbgmgr.exe
Jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax
The jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax involved an e-mail spam in 2002 that advised computer users to delete a file named jdbgmgr.exe because it was a computer virus...
file found in windows operating systems which had a teddy bear as its icon. FTB may also be a play, or pun, on the existing File Transfer Protocol, (FTP,) which can be used to transfer large chunks of binary data between computers. Stibbons is concerned by these signs that Hex might be alive, but dismisses these thoughts, insisting that Hex only thinks it is alive.
Hex can apparently be shut down completely by means of a Big Red Lever
Big red button
A big red button , sometimes called a big red switch , is a real or fictional button with various functions. The purpose of being big and red is for its quick identification and actuation...
. This seems to worry it, further indicating sentient life because it is afraid of death
Short Circuit
Short Circuit is a 1986 comedy science fiction film starring Ally Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg and directed by John Badham. Fisher Stevens, Austin Pendleton, and G. W...
. An example of this is shown in Hogfather
Hogfather
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a 1997 British Fantasy Award nominee.The Hogfather is also a character in the book, representing something akin to Father Christmas. He grants children's wishes on Hogswatchnight and brings them presents...
where, when Death approaches Hex, it asks if it is "Big Red Lever time?"
Other Discworld computers
According to The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's WatchThe Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch
The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch is a book set on the Discworld, by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. It is the sequel to The Science of Discworld and The Science of Discworld II: The Globe....
, another Hex-like machine has been invented by the smaller magical university of Braseneck College. This is much simpler than the original, however; according to Stibbons, Hex is technically a Very Big Thing, while the Braseneck device is barely a Quite Big Thing (the next step up would be a Great Big Thing, every particle of the universe being modelled within it; apparently these terms are quite exact, as when the Lecturer in Recent Runes postulated that the Braseneck wizards would try and build an Even Bigger Thing, Ponder Stibbons corrected him. Apparently a Very Big Thing is capable of pushing boundaries twice as big up to three times as far as a Quite Big Thing).
The Hex-like machine was mentioned again in Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals is the 37th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The novel satirises football , and features Mustrum Ridcully setting up an Unseen University football team, with the Librarian in goal. It includes new details about "below stairs" life at the university...
, as constructed by the staff of the Higher Energy Magic Building at Braseneck college, and was given the name Pex. Pex was apparently powered by chickens rather than ants, a technology which was considered superior as the eggs it provided were edible. Adrian Turnipseed was responsible for its construction and maintenance, using various technologies he had learned from Ponder while helping to build the original Hex. However, he had apparently not learned well enough, as a seventy-foot chicken broke out of the Higher Energy Magic Building and demolished much of Pseudopolis—and presumably Pex as well.
Messages
Hex has a habit of spewing bizarre messages. Its "Out of Cheese" error from Interesting Times caught the fancy of many information technologyInformation technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
employees, turning up in real-word systems
and in programming books.
It alludes to the many confusing error messages that technology users have had to put up with in the Information Age
Information Age
The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Digital Age, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously...
. "Out of Paper" (also seen as "PC LOAD LETTER
PC Load Letter
PC LOAD LETTER is a technology meme, originally a printer error message, which has grown into popular culture as a reference to a confusing or inappropriate error message.-Explanation:...
" for some printers) is familiar to many office workers. "Redo From Start" was the somewhat unhelpful error message produced by the BASIC
BASIC
BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use - the name is an acronym from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code....
interpreter
Interpreter (computing)
In computer science, an interpreter normally means a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language...
in many early home computers when non-numeric characters were entered in response to a prompt for numerical input. Other inscrutable Hex-talk includes:
+++Mr. Jelly! Mr. Jelly!+++
+++Error at Address Number 14, Treacle Mine Road.+++
+++Melon melon melon+++
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++
+++Oneoneoneoneoneoneone+++
Hex's messages are often delimited by the sequence +++, which recalls the escape sequence
Escape sequence
An escape sequence is a series of characters used to change the state of computers and their attached peripheral devices. These are also known as control sequences, reflecting their use in device control. Some control sequences are special characters that always have the same meaning...
in the Hayes command set
Hayes command set
The Hayes command set is a specific command-language originally developed for the Hayes Smartmodem 300 baud modem in 1981. The command set consists of a series of short text strings which combine together to produce complete commands for operations such as dialing, hanging up, and changing the...
, a standard used in dial-up modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s.
In the PlayStation game Discworld II: Missing, Presumed..., if the player asks the question "Why?", Hex spits out various error messages different from those in the books:
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* End of Cheese Error
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Can Not Find Drive Z:
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Unknown Application Error
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Please Reboot Universe
*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Year Of The Sloth *Blip* *Blip* *Blip*
This echoes the science-fiction "does not compute
Does not compute
"Does not compute", and variations on it, is a phrase often spoken by computers, robots and other artificial intelligences in science fiction works of the 1960s to 1980s...
" cliché
Cliché
A cliché or cliche is an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning,...
, in which the protagonist confuses, locks up, or destroys a dangerous computer by giving it riddles or making paradoxical statements, like: "Everything I say is a lie."
Appearances
Hex appears in the books Interesting TimesInteresting Times
Interesting Times is the seventeenth novel in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.The opening lines explain that the title refers to the phrase "may you live in interesting times".-Plot summary:...
, Soul Music (novel), Hogfather
Hogfather
Hogfather is the 20th Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, and a 1997 British Fantasy Award nominee.The Hogfather is also a character in the book, representing something akin to Father Christmas. He grants children's wishes on Hogswatchnight and brings them presents...
, The Last Continent
The Last Continent
The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. First published in 1998, it mocks the aspects of time traveling such as the grandfather paradox and the Ray Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder"...
, Going Postal
Going Postal
Going Postal is Terry Pratchett's 33rd Discworld novel, released in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2004. Unlike most of Pratchett's Discworld novels, Going Postal is divided into chapters, a feature previously seen only in Pratchett's children's books and the Science of Discworld series...
, The Science of Discworld
The Science of Discworld
The Science of Discworld is a 1999 book by novelist Terry Pratchett and popular science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. Two sequels, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe and The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch, have been written by the same authors.The book alternates between a...
I, II and III, Making Money
Making Money
Making Money is a Terry Pratchett novel in the Discworld series, first published in the UK on 20 September 2007. It is the second novel featuring Moist von Lipwig, and involves the Ankh-Morpork mint and specifically the introduction of paper money to the city...
and Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals
Unseen Academicals is the 37th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The novel satirises football , and features Mustrum Ridcully setting up an Unseen University football team, with the Librarian in goal. It includes new details about "below stairs" life at the university...
and in the video game Discworld II: Missing Presumed...!?
Real world connections
The inspiration for Hex, which evolves through seemingly unexplainable upgrades like extra cheese, the FTB protocol, a CWL (Clothes Wringer from the Laundry, for crunching numbers and other things), and "small religious pictures" (iconComputer icon
A computer icon is a pictogram displayed on a computer screen and used to navigate a computer system or mobile device. The icon itself is a small picture or symbol serving as a quick, intuitive representation of a software tool, function or a data file accessible on the system. It functions as an...
s), came from Pratchett's own early experiments with unfathomable upgrades on his ZX-81.
The name is a play on two meanings of the word "hex": a hex can be a "magical spell", but it is also number of ants legs - HEX equal 6 in greece. The ants are powering the HEX! Also, hex is often used as slang for hexadecimal, the base 16 system used in several programming languages.
In 2001, a new Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
Origin 2800 supercomputer was installed as part of the University of Leicester
University of Leicester
The University of Leicester is a research-led university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is a mile south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park and Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I College....
's Centre for Mathematical Modelling and, with Pratchett's blessing, named HEX.