Ever notice how often writers use the word “priesthood” to describe the operations teams in charge of mainframes? Neither the Spanish, nor the Roman, nor any other national or ecclesiastical Inquisition was anywhere in sight of the development of mainframes, yet people keep resurrecting anti-clerical tropes from the Black Legends in order to impugn them. For example, in Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely described IBM’s PS/2 line as an attempt to make the computer industry “return to Holy Mother Church.”