Geek Chic

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Geek Chic


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 PR1ME 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 conversation mode and
expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave the occassional
acknowledgements, although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest
and least critical path to her entry 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 loaded by this; his hardware was in danger of
overflowing its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his
analyst about.

"Core", was all he could say, 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, though, and could not be turned off.
But Mini soon stopped his thrashing by introducing a coltage spike into
his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to
sleep.

"Computers!", she thought, as she recompiled herself.  "All they ever
think of is hex!"


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