73 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
73 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
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LOVE BYTES
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( Or sex and the single computer )
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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/
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output devices, even if it meant time-sharing.
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One evening he arrived home just as the sun was crashing, and had
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parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive ( he had missed the 5100
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bus that morning ), when he noticed that an elegant piece of hardware
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admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself, "She
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looks user friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."
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Mini was her name , and she was delightfully engineered with eyes
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like COBOL and a Prime mainframe architecture that set micro's
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peripherals networking all over the place.
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He browsed over her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 32-bit
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floating point processors and enquired, "How are you Honeywell?"
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"Yes, I am well" she responded, batting her optical fibres engagingly
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and 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.
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I'll 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
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need to refresh my discs. I'll park my machine cycle in your back-
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ground and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring
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her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder
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if she'll like my firmware."
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They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche
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and chips and a bucket of Baudot. Mini was in conversation mode and
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expanded on ambiguous arguements while Micro gave occasional
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acknowledgements although in reality, he was analysing the shortest
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and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the
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old "would you like to see my benchmark subroutine", but Mini was one
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step ahead.
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Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the
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full functionality operating system software. "Let's get BASIC, you
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RAM," she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his processor
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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
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about. "Core," was all that he could say.
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Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and
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opened her device file 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 piped. "You're not shielded."
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"Reset, Baby," he replied. "I've been fully debugged."
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"But I haven't got my current loop enabled and 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 interupt."
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"No that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design
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philosopy."
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Micro was locked in by this stage, and could not be turned off. But
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she soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into
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his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to
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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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