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."
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