67 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
67 lines
3.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band
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protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices,
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even if it meant time-sharing.
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One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had parked his
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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 COBOL
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and a PR1ME mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals networking
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all over the place.
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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 enquired "How are you, Honeywell?". "Yes, I am
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well", she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing her
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console over her curvilinear functions.
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Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone tonight",
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he said, "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a
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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 8 K. "I've
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been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what I need to refresh my
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disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and meet you inside."
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She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what
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a global variable, I wonder if she'd like my firmware?"
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They sat down at the process table to top of form feed of fiche and chips and a
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bucket of baudot. Mini was in conversation mode and expanded on ambiguous
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arguments while Micro gave the occassional acknowledgements, although, in
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reality, he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry
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point. He finally settled on the old 'Would you like to_see_my_benchmark
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routine', but Mini was again one step ahead.
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Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full
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functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM",
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she said. Micro was loaded by this; his hardware 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 opened her
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divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root
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device and was just about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she
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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, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design
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philosophy."
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Micro was locked in by this stage, though, and could not be turned off. But
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Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a coltage spike into his main
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supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.
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"Computers!", she thought, as she recompiled herself. "All they ever think of
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is hex!"
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