CPU Wars
underground comic strip by Charles Andres
CPU Wars is an underground comic strip by Charles Andres that circulated around Digital Equipment Corporation and other computer manufacturers starting in 1977. It described a hypothetical invasion of Digital's slightly disguised Maynard, Massachusetts ex-woolen mill headquarters (now located in Barnyard, Mass) by troops from IPM, the Impossible to Program Machine Corporation in a rather-blunt-edged parody of IBM. The humor hinged on the differences in style and culture between the invading forces of IPM and the laid-back employees of the Human Equipment Corporation. For example, even at gunpoint, the employees were unable to lead the invading forces to their leaders because they had no specific leaders as a result their corporation's use of matrix management.
The comic was drawn by a DEC employee, initially anonymous and later self-revealed to be Charles Andres. A compendium of the strips was finally published in 1980.
The most notable trace of the comic is the phrase Eat flaming death, supposedly derived from a famously turgid line in a World War II-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran “Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!” or something of the sort (however, it is also reported that on the Firesign Theatre's 1975 album In The Next World, You're On Your Own a character won the right to scream “Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs” in the middle of Oscar night on a game show; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “CPU Wars” is underground comic strip by Charles Andres. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wars, underground and comic, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 21, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5013752. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1980 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “CPU Wars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.