READER DISCRETION: PG18
A romantic lovestory
Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band
protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output
devices, even if it meant time-sharing.
One evening he arrived home just as the sun was crashing, and had
parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the
5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware
admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She
looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."
Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like
COBOL (**** Miranda ***) and a PR1ME mainframe architecture that set
Micro's peripherals networking all over the place.
He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 32-bit
floating point processors and enquired "How are you, Honeywell?" "Yes,
I am well", she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and
smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.
Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone
tonight," he said, "How about computing a vector to my base address?
I'll output a byte to eat, and maybe we could get offset later on."
Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds then transmitted
8k, "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I
need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background
and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her
solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder if she'd
like my firmware?"
They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche and
chips and a bucket of baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and
expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
acknowledgments although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and
least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old
would_you_like_to_see_my_benchmark routine, but Mini was again one step
ahead.
Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the
full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get BASIC,
you RAM," she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware
policing module had a processor of it's own and was in danger of overflowing
its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his
analyst about. "Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log
him off.
Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the DEC and
opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his
fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing into her
CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.
"No, No!" she cried, "You're not shielded."
"Reset, baby", he replied, "I've been debugged."
"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support
child processes," she protested.
"Don't run away", he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."
"No that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my
design philosophy."
Micro was locked in by this stage though, and could not be
turned off. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a
voltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a
head crash and went to sleep.
"Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself, "All they ever
think of is HEX."
PS: THIS IS JUST TO CHEER SOME OF YOU. HOPE NO ONE FINDS IT OFFENSIVE.
Cheers,
Mr Makaveli (o-:)
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