Short Story:The Computer Who Wrote to Santa Claus

“The Computer Who Wrote to Santa Claus” (also known as “FTB” and “The Megabyte Drive to Believe in Santa Claus”, among other titles) is an early story by Terry Pratchett, originally published in the Western Daily Press in December 1988.

It concerns a Dawn Age computer (in the unbelievably primitive 1980s) that develops sentience and asks for a Christmas present from Santa Claus. This was later recycled into the episode in Hogfather where Hex tremblingly avoids Big Red Lever Time and requests, and gets, a teddy bear from the entity who is standing in for the Hogfather.

Publication history

The story was reprinted by the Western Daily Press under its original title in 1992 (with the added subtitle “...and put back the fun into giving out the presents”), and in 1996, using the title “The Megabyte Drive to Believe in Santa Claus”. (In his note for later collections, Pratchett erroneously (or purposefullly) remembers this being the original title and publication date, probably because it was the version he had to hand when those books were compiled.) A revised version appeared in The Sunday Telegraph in 2001 as “The computer who believed in Santa”, but that title was an editorial choice; Pratchett wanted the title “FTB”, which was the title used in the collections Once More* *with Footnotes in 2004 and A Blink of the Screen in 2012. The story was collected again in 2017 in Father Christmas's Fake Beard under the title “The Computer Who Wrote to Father Christmas”.