66 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
66 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
From gm@trsvax.sq.com.UUCP Mon May 23 17:51:49 1988
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Flags: 000000000001
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From: gm@trsvax.sq.com.UUCP (George Moore)
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Subject: Mini & Micro
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Keywords: sexual, chuckle
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Date: 23 May 88 18:51:49 GMT
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[ For those who are tired of endless repostings of the Sex Life of an
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Electron, which I first read when I was 16, here's a different one. ]
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Micro was a real-time operator and a dedicated multi-user. His broadband
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protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output
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devices, even if it meant time-sharing.
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One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had parked
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his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that
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morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy
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wheels in his garden. He though to himself, "She looks user-friendly.
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I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."
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He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin 32 bit
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floating point processors, and inquired, "How are you, Honeywell?"
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"Yes, I am well", she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and
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smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.
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Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone
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tonight", he said. "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll
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output a byte to eat and maybe we could get offset later on."
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Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then transmitted 8K,
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"I've been recently dumped myself and a new page is just what I need to
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refresh my disk packs. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and
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meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and
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thinking, "Wow, what a global variable! I wonder if she'd like my
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firmware?"
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They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche and
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chips and a bottle of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanded
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on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional acknowledgements
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although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path
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to her entry point. He finally settled on the old line, "Would you like to
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see my benchmark subroutine?", but Mini was again one clock tick ahead.
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Suddenly, she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the
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full functionality of her operating system. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM" she
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said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing module had
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a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its output buffer,
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a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core", was all he
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could say, as she prepared to log him off.
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Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and opened
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her device files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully
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packed root device and was about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when
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she attempted an escape sequence.
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"No, no!" she cried. "You're not shielded!"
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"Reset, baby", he replied. "I've been debugged."
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"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child
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processes", she protested.
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"Don't run away", he said. "I'll generate an interrupt."
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"No!" she squealed. "That's too error prone and I can't abort because
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of my design philosophy."
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But Micro was locked in by this stage and could not be turned off. Mini
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stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main supply,
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whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.
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"Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself. "All they ever think
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of is hex!"
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--
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Edited by Brad Templeton. MAIL your jokes to {watmath|att}!looking!funny .!.
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