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 68040 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100
bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of live ware
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 and a PRIME 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 inquired "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 top of form feed of fiche and
chips and a bucket of baudot.
Mini was in conversation mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments
while Micro gave the 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; his hardware 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 recompiled herself......
......."All they ever think of is hex!"
