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.