Micro-Mini Micro was a real-time operator and 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 he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and
had parked his Motorola 68040 in the main drive (he had missed the
5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware
admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He thought to himself,
"She looks user-friendly. 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 browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin,
32-bit floating point processors and enquired "How are you, Honeywell?"
"Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly
and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.
Micro 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 transmitted
8 k, "I've been dumped myself recently, and a new page is just what
I need to refresh my disks. I'll park my machine cycle in your background
and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her
solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable, I wonder if
she'd like my firmware?"
They sat down at the process table to top of form feed of fiche
and chips and a bucket of baudot. Mini was in conversational mode
and expanded on ambiguous arguments while micro gave the occasional
acknowledgements, although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest
and least critical path to her input point. He finally settled on
the old would you like to see my benchmark routine, but Mini was
again one step ahead.
Suddenly 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 said. Micro was so loaded by this he was
in danger of overflowing his buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted
his analyst about. "Core," was all he could output, as she prepared
to log him off.
Micro soon recovered, however, when Mini went down on the DEC and
opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed
his fully packed root device and was just about to start pushing
into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.
"No, no!" she cried, "You're not shielded!"
"Reset, Baby," he replied, "I've been debugged."
"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support
child processes," she protested.
"Don't run away," he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."
"No, that's too error prone, and I can't abort because of my design
philosophy."
Micro was locked in by this stage, and could not be turned off.
But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike
into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and
froze.
Computers!" she thought as she recompiled herself, "All they ever
think of is hex!"