A LOVE STORY
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Micro was a real time user and a dedicated multi-user.
His broad-band protocol made it easy for him to
interface with numerous input/output devices, even if it
meant time sharing.
One evening Micro arrived home just as the sun was
crashing. He had parked his Motorola 68000 in the
main drive - he had missed the 5100 bus that moring,
when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware
inspecting the daisy wheels in his garden. "She looks
user-friendly," he thought. "I'll see if she'd like an
update tonight."
Mini was her name and she was delightfully
engineered with eyes like cobol and a prime
mainframe architecture that set Micro's peripherals
networking all over the place.
He shifted over to her casually, admiring the power of
her twin 32-bit floating point processors and inquired,
"How are you, Honeywell?"
"Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optic
fibers engagingly and smoothing her console over her
curvilinear functions. Micro thought about a recursive
approach but settled for a straight line approximation.
"I'm stand-alone tonight," he said. "How about
computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a
byte to eat and maybe we could get offset later on."
Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds then
dumped the results. "I've been put on a queue myself
recently and a rendezvous is just what I need to
activate my tasks. I'll park my machine cycle and meet
you inside." She walked off leaving Micro admiring
the way her dynamic resources were allocated and
thinking, "Wow, what a cache! I wonder if she's
available for prime time maintenance."
They sat down at the process table to a platter of fiche
and chips and a basket of baudot. Mini was in
conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous
arguments while Micro gave continuous
acknowledgements although, in background, he was
analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her
entry point. He finally decided on the old 'Would you
like to see some of my benchmark programs' but Mini
anticipated his flow.
Without a prompt, she was up and stripping off her
parity bits to reveal the full functionality of her
operating system software. "Let;s get BASIC, you
RAM," she commanded. Micro was executing
firmware by this stage, but his hardware policing
module had an accelerated processor and was in
danger of overflowing its output buffer - a bug that
Micro had been consulting his analyst about. "Core
dump!" he complained.
Micro auto-recovered however, when Mini went
down on DEC and opened her divide files to reveal
her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root
device and was just about to enter her kernal when she
attempted an escape sequence.
"Abort!" she cried. "You're not shielded."
"Reset, baby," he said. "I've been debugged."
"But I haven't got my current loop disabled and I can't
support child processes," she protested.
"Don't run away," he begged. "I'll generate an
interrupt."
"No, that's too error prone - and I can't abort because
of my design philosophy."
Micro was in phase locked oscillations by this stage
and could not be terminated. But Mini soon stopped
his thrashing by inducing a voltage spike in his main
supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and
went to sleep.
"Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself.
"All they ever think about is hex!