The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Fri, 8 Mar 1996 15:20:01 +0000
...and another one folks...:-)
Wishes and Dreams...
- ANDREA
------- Forwarded message follows -------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 20:05:29 +0000
From: David Clarke <Humour@silktown.demon.co.uk>
To: Andrea Chee <ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>
Subject: Fwd: Micro meets Mini
------- Forwarded message follows -------
This is a little different...
Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His
broadband 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 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the S100 bus that
morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of live wire admiring the daisy
wheels in the 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 fibres 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 "8K,
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'll like my firmware."
They sat down at the process table to a 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 occasional acknowledgements although, in
reality, he was analysing the shortest and least critical path to her entry
point. He finally settled on the old 'would you like to see my benchmark
subroutine', but Mini was again one step ahead.
Suddenly she was up and stripping off her SQL Net and parity bits to
reveal the full functionality of her operating system software. "Let's get
BASIC, you RAM," she said. Micro's ORACLE was already started up, but his
hardware polling module had a processor of its own and was in danger of
overflowing its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulting his analyst
about. "Core!" was all he could say.
Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and
opened her device 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 piped. "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 though, and could not be turned off.
But soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his mains
supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.
"Computers," she thought as she compiled herself, "all they ever think
of is hex."
______________________________________________________________________________
Dave Vickers Internet : dvickers@uk.oracle.com
Software Engineer Oracle*Office : dvickers.uk
Oracle EDC Bittams Lane Telephone :
+44-1932-872020 x2330
Chertsey, Surrey KT16 9RG Fax : +44-1932-873273
______________________________________________________________________________
--
Andrea J Chee
--
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