• Publication and Cover: "THE MAD COMPUTER PROGRAM" is featured on the cover of MAD magazine No. 258 from October 1985, with an image on the computer monitor.
• Pages and Departments: It spreads across pages 36 and 37, filed under the "Data All, Folks! Dept." Sergio Aragones drew the associated artwork and wrote the copy.
• Programming Details: Written in [BASIC], with bootstrap code provided for Apple, Atari, Commodore and IBM systems. Notes for different users mention saving the program before printing (Apple), no Atari note, waiting 20 minutes for Commodore graphics (and ensuring it's plugged in), and needing a "color card" for IBM.
• Artwork on Pages: Sergio Aragones' artwork on page 36 shows a man on a tropical island, a cleaning lady sweeping ones and zeros, 2 nerds in binary, a young hacker causing havoc, and a man replacing his typewriter with a computer. On page 37, there's a woman slapping a man after an offensive instant message, a man shocked to find his computer powered by an abacus, a child's view of computers vs. parents' view, a father bragging about a floppy disk and his child mutilating it, and an army at the mercy of a broken computer.
• Continuation on Pages: The program continues onto page 38 with more notes directing users to line 500 on page 38. On page 39, it encourages readers to send a printout to a specific address and features more Sergio Aragones' artwork, such as a panicking school principal and tractor-feed paper used as toilet paper.
• Apple Version Source: The full Apple version of the source code is provided with a series of coordinate-pairs for line-segments. Running it in [AppleWin] shows the image.
• Other Versions: A [Java] version generates an image file, and a [Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)] version is also available. Readers can download the BASIC source, Java source and SVG version by clicking a link.
• Acknowledgements: Thanks to Lawrence D'Oliveiro for explaining a comic, Andy Klock for helping type in the program, and Kris Kennaway for discovering a typo in the copyrighted source code.