69 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
THE STORY OF CREATION
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or
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THE MYTH OF URK
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In the beginning there was data. The data was without form and null, and
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darkness was upon the face of the console; and the Spirit of IBM was moving
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over the face of the market. And DEC said, "Let there be registers"; and there
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were registers. And DEC saw that they carried; and DEC separated the data from
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the instructions. DEC called the data Stack, and the instructions they called
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Code. And there was evening and there was morning, one interrupt.
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And DEC said, "Let there be a word in the midst of the data, and let it
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separate the data from the registers." And DEC made the word and separated the
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data which were under the Stack from the registers which were above the memory.
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And it was so. And DEC called the memory Core. And there was evening and
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there was morning, a second interrupt.
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And DEC said, "Let the data under the stack be gathered together into one
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place, and let partitions appear." And it was so. DEC defined the partitions
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as 4Kw, and the data that were gathered together they called BLOCKS. And DEC
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saw that it was good. And DEC said, "Let the CPU put for addresses, pointers
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yielding bytes, and structures bearing words in which there is data, each
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according to its type, upon the partition." And it was so. And DEC saw that no
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bits stuck. And there was evening and there was morning, a third interrupt.
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And DEC said, "Let there be lights upon the console of the CPU to separate
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the addresses from the data; and let them be for signs and for diagnostics and
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for blinking. And it was so. And DEC made the two great Buses, the greater
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Bus to rule the CPU, and the lesser Bus to rule the peripherals; they made the
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peri- pherals also. And DEC set them on line to give data to the CPU. And DEC
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saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth
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interrupt.
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And DEC said, "Let the Bus bring forth swarms of data, and let stack pointers
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fly above the data across the partitions of the Core." So Bell created the
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great C monsters.c and every a.out that runs, with data swarming, and every
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pointer according to its type." And Bell saw that is it was good. And Bell
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blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and fork and fill the partitions in the
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Core, and let processes multiply." And there was evening and there was morning,
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a fifth interrupt.
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And Bell said, "Let there be UNIX." And it was so. And Bell made the errors
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of the Bus according to their kinds and the faults of memory according to their
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kinds, and everything that core-dumps upon the disk according to its error.
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And Bell saw that it was good. Then Bell said, "Let us make debuggers for the
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image; and let them have dominion over the a.out, and over the breakpoints, and
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over every address that sits upon the stack." So Bell created parity; in the
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image of Core they created it; even and odd they created it. And Bell checked
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it and saw that it was good. And Bell said of UNIX "Behold, We have given you
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every pointer yielding objects, and every identifier with value in its address;
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you shall have them for food. And to every device on the Bus, and to every
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program in the bin, and to everything that creeps on the disk, everything that
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has the mode of allocation, We have given inodes to check." And it was so. And
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Bell saw everything that they had made, and behold, it was a lot better that
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RSTS/E. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth interrupt.
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Thus the hardware and the software were finished, and all the host of system
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calls. On the seventh interrupt, it crashed.
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[Credit for this piece, originally written in 1978 at Reed College, goes to
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Rico Tudor (now at Mark Williams Co.), who used 'ed' global change commands on
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the original (accurate) text of Genesis. It is reprinted here without his
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permission. - Phil]
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