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
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 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 acknowledgements 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 subroutine?" 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 interupt."
"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 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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