From: hans@iris.mincom.oz.au (Hans Plambeck)
Newsgroups: rec.humor
Subject: Micro and Mini, a lovestory ?
Date: 23 Jul 92 22:46:25 GMT
Reply-To: hans@iris.mincom.oz.au (Hans Plambeck)
Organization: Mincom, Brisbane, Australia.

While cleaning up, I found this. Source unknown - dated 1985.

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 68000 in the main drive (he had
missed the S100 bus this morning), when he noticed an
elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his
garden. He though 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
eyse like Cobol and a prime mainframe architechure 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, Honewell?' "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 am 
standalone tonight.' he said. 'How about computing a vector to
my base address. I  will output a byte to eat, and maybe we
could offset later on.'

Mini ran a prioprity process for 2.6 milli-seconds then
transmitted "8k, i have been dumped myself recently, and a new
page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I will 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 will
like my firmware.'

The 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 ambigous 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 bench-mark subroutine?', 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
loaded by this stage 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 consulted his 
analyst about. 'Core', was all he could say. Micro soon 
recovered, however when she went down on the Dec and opened
her device 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 are not shielded."
'Reset baby,' he replied, 'I have bee 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 shee 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 though as she compiled herself, "All they
ever think of is Hex!"
-- 
Hans-J Plambeck   Mincom Pty Ltd       hans@mincom.oz.au  +61 (7) 364 9999