In the  beginning,  God created the bit.  And the  bit was a
zero; nothing.

On the first day, he toggled the 0 to a 1,  and the Universe
was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and "ac-
tive low" signals didn't yet exist.)

On the second day,  God's boss  wanted a demo,  and tried to
read the bit.  This being volatile memory,  the bit reverted
to a 0. And the Universe wasn't.  God learned the importance
of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day
(and his first all-nighter) reconstructing the universe.

On the  third day,  the bit cried  "Oh, Lord!  If you exist,
give me a sign!"  And God  created ver 2.0  of the bit, even
better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marke-
ting  immediately realized that  "new and improved" wouldn't
do justice to such a grand and glorious creation.  And so it
was dubbed the Most Significant Bit,  or the Sign Bit.  Many
bits followed, but only one was so honoured.

On the fourth day,  God created  a simple ALU with 'add' and
'logical shift' instructions.  And the original bit discove-
red that by performing a single shift instruction,  it could
become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the impor-
tance of computer security.

On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev
2.0 of  the ALU,  with wonderful features,  and said  "Screw
that add and  shift stuff.  Go forth and multiply."  And God
saw that it was good.

On the sixth day,  God got a bit overconfident, and invented
pipelines,  register hazards,  optimizing compilers,  cross-
talk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race condi-
tions, and propagation delays.  Historians have used this to
convincingly  argue that the sixth day must have been a Mon-
day.

On the seventh day,  an engineering change  introduced [name
of buggy  component deleted to  keep lawyers happy] into the
Universe, and it hasn't worked right since.