"Hello World!"

Given that you are reading this, the chances are that you have either heard, seen, typed or perhaps had dreams about the title of this post (depending on how much of a recluse you are). Entitling my first post initiated a chain of thoughts which resulted in my researching the origins of the "celebrity status" which this phrase holds. According to an extremely reputable internet website (henceforth referred to as "Wikipedia"):

While small test programs existed since the development of programmable computers, the tradition of using the phrase "Hello world!" as a test message was influenced by an example program in the seminal book The C Programming Language. The example program from that book prints "hello, world" (without capital letters or exclamation mark), and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Laboratories internal memorandum by Brian Kernighan, Programming in C: A Tutorial, which contains the first known version:

main() {
   printf("hello, world");
}

The first known instance of the usage of the words "hello" and "world" together in computer literature occurred earlier, in Kernighan's 1972 Tutorial Introduction to the Language B, with the following code:

main( ) {
extrn a, b, c;
putchar(a); putchar(b); putchar(c); putchar('!*n');
}
a 'hell';
b 'o, w';
c 'orld';

Due to the nature of probability, there is a chance you have still haven't the foggiest idea as to what is going on. Do I care? Not enough.