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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 Motorolla 68000 in the main drive(he had missed the S100 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. 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 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 about 2.6 milliseconds then transmitted
8K. "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I
need to to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your back-
ground 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 finche 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 anyalyzing 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 of her parity bits to reveal the full
fuctionality 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 own and was in danger of overflowing its output
buffer, a hangup 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, where upon he fell over with a head crash and went to
sleep. "Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself. "All they
ever think about is HEX."
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