78 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
78 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
From consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu Fri Oct 6 16:57:05 1989
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From: consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Optimist Prime)
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Subject: Micro (Offensive to computers and computer-wanna-bes)
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===============================================================================
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FROM THE PSEUDO-MINDS AT IBM:
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(With some embellishment by yours truly)
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-------------------------------------------
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Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-
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band 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 he parked
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his Motorola 68040 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning),
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when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his
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garden. He thought to himself, "she looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd
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like an update tonight."
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Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like
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cobol and a prime mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals
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networking all over the place.
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He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin 32-
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bit floating point processors and enquired "how are you, Honeywell?" "Yes,
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I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing
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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
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8k, "I've been dumped myself, recently, and a new page is just what I need
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to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background task
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and meet you inside. She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids
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and 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 file allocation table to a top of form feed of
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fiche and microchips, and a bucket of Baudot. Mini was in conversational
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mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
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acknowledgments although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and
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least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old
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'would you like to see my benchmark subroutine?' but Mini was again one
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single step ahead.
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Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal
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the full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get basic,
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you ram," she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware
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policing module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing
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its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about.
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"Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off.
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Micro soon recovered however, when Mini went down on the DEC and
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opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his
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fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing into her
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cpu stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.
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"No, no," she cried. "You're not shielded, especially with all
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of these viruses going around...."
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"Reset, baby," he replied, "I've been debugged and disinfected."
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"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support
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a spawned child process," she protested.
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"Don't run away," he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."
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"No, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my
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design philosophy."
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Micro was locked in by the state though, and could not be turned
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off. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike
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into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went
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to sleep.
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"Computers," she thought as she compiled herself. "All they ever
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think of is hex."
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===============================================================================
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The original story came from IBM. I embellished it because of the newfound
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virus-crazed people out there.
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+-------///---------------------------------------------------------\\\-------+
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| /// Brett Kessler \\\ |
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| /// ============= \\\ |
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| \\\/// E-Mail to: consp11@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu \\\/// |
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| \XX/ and to: consp11@bingvaxa.BITNET \XX/ |
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+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
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