From the            
                        JOKIN' AROUND DISK    
                               by               
                        LEEJAN ENTERPRISES    
                     P.O. Box 66. Happy Valley.
                       South Australia. 5159.  


Minnie the Micro

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 parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had 
missed the S100 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 wants 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 (whilst dreaming of 
nibbling her floppies), 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 a 
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 milli-seconds then transmitted "8k, I've 
been dumped myself just recently, and a new page is just 
what I need to refresh my discs.  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 look-up table to a line-feed of fiche 
and chips and a bucket of bits.  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 parity bits to 
reveal the full functionality of her operating system 
software.  "Let's go Basic, you Ram." she said.  Micro was 
loaded at this stage, but his hardware polling module had a 
processor of it's own and was in danger of overflowing it's 
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 devices files to reveal her data set ready. 
He accessed his 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 a child process", she protested.

"Don't run away", he said.  "I'll generate an interrupt".

"No, that's too error prone, and can abort because of my 
design philosophy."

Micro was locked in by this stage though, and could not be 
turned off.  But she 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 said as she compiled herself.  "All they 
every think of is Hex."

         

                  
	                     From the            
                        JOKIN' AROUND DISK    
                               by               
                        LEEJAN ENTERPRISES    
                     P.O. Box 66. Happy Valley.
                       South Australia. 5159.