Shareware 1 2 the Maxx/sw_1.zip/sw_1/JOKES/JOKES_S.ZIP/SYSMGR.STY

Text File | 1992-01-08 | 61KB | 1,136 lines

  ----- The Adventures of System Restriction Underwriter Manager ---

            Part I - Simon Travaglia (circa ~1986)


Look, coming along the UniBus, is it a BugCheck, is it a CHMK? No, it's
SRUMAN!!  Yes,  it's SRUMAN, strange remote access from another system.
SRUMAN, with privileges and  Quotas beyond those of  normal  processes.
SRUMAN, who  came  to  change  the course of nasty DISK ACCESSes.  Who,
cleverly disguised as the Null process, fights  a  never-ending  battle
for Diskquota, Privileges, and the digital way!

We begin our story, on Node VEX::, Waikato  University  (Hamilton,  New
Zealand), 3:00 am on an ordinary looking morning

     It was a quiet night on the Userdisk.  Too damn quiet.   I  didn't
like  it.  Someone, somewhere, somehow, sometime, someday, some* was up
to something.   I  decided  to  cruise  the  userdisk,  looking  for  a
suspicious  file  header.   AAH HAH!!!!!  There, at the very end of the
indexing file.  Pretty suspicious if you ask me.  I examined  the  file
id.  Sure enough, it was pointing to a very seedy part of the userdisk,
known for badblocks and lost files..  I hailed a read head and said I'd
give  him ten extra blocks if he didn't report the disk access.  When I
got to the spot I knew I was at the right place.  It wasn't the sort of
place that a normal process would GOTO alone.  I ducked behind a barrel
as a couple of random accesses went by.

     I spotted the culprit straight away.  He looked  as  inconspicuous
as an integer in a boolean mask.  A  nasty  looking  chap,  probably an
escapee  from  a  virtual  mapping.  I brb'd over and asked him what he
thought  he  was doing here.  He said he got separated from the rest of
his file when they were on a routine rename.   I didn't believe  a word
of it,  he was lying,  I could read him like  an RX02.   He  must  have
thought I'd come down on the last revision, Hah!

     I quickly found the evidence, the file id's  pointed  straight  at
him.   I  read  him  his rights.  "You have the right to remain unread.
Should you wish not to remain unread, anything of consequence shall  be
copied  to  sys$input and  used against you in a set file/truncate."  I
took him in for questioning.  The Userdisk was safe for another day.

     I waited around for a while, hoping some lonely disk IO might want
some  company,  but  it  was  not  to be.  It's a lonely life being the
saviour of the system, but that's the sacrifice I had to make.  One  of
these  days  I'd  retire  to a far corner of a foreign subdirectory and
write my memoirs, but for now, life goes on.

     I  was  shaken  out  of  my  thoughts  by  a  message  across  the
sub-ethernet.   There  was  two  wildcards on the loose, having escaped
>From a captive account.  I was got uneasy when I heard the  first name,
worried  when  I  heard the second.  They were two of the nastiest bugs
around.    They  were  carriage  return  (known  to  his friends as the
TERMINATOR)  and  his  side  kick,  Line Feed.  They  were  a  very bad
combination, ending command lines all over the place.

     With a 'Hi Ho Diskquota' I leaped onto my trusty IOSB.   It was an
old  reconditioned model, but it had a good status indicating plenty of
good operations yet.    I kicked it into life and  roared  off  past  a
terminal  driver.  You had to be real careful with terminal drivers, no
respect for life.  I waved to a QIOW  going  the  other  way  before  I
realised  that  the return status was all wrong.  I spun my IOSB around
and floored the Io$mNowait.  In seconds I was  upon  him.   A  standard
Qiow with no modifiers stood no chance against my IOSB.

     Sure enough, it's  two  occupants  were  Line  Feed  and  Carriage
Return.   I  fired a warning HALT instruction across their PCB but they
paid no ATTN.

     Instead, they returned a couple of $EXITs.  One hit my IOSB and it
slid  to  a  halt against a couple of output buffers.  Now I was really
angry!  I ducked into a friendly basic enviroment and changed  mode  to
Kernel.   I  then pulled out my submachinepatcher and blasted them into
oblivion (NL:) with rapid fire exception vectors.  They  didn't  really
stand a chance.

            ***  Once more the System was safe.  ***

    After all that I decided to see Job Control to see if I could get a
steady  job, still  in  the  public  eye,  but a little less hazardous.
Something like redirecting output  or  changing  passwords.   I entered
today's  events  in  the  logfile and prepared to $HIBER for the night,
scheduling a wakeup call for 6:00am.   I  went  to see Job Control real
early  as  he  doesn't  like  to be kept waiting.  I'm never late for a
meeting  with  JC, the last person that was late and Job Control forgot
about him...   Nasty that, out of sight,  swapped out of memory.

     When I got there I put my case before him and The Scheduler.   I'm
getting too old for this game,  it's  time  some  wet-behind-the-input-
buffers late version SRUMAN came along to take my place.   They  needed
someone who liked sinking up to there knees in gooey stuff whenever the
system had an internal consistancy failure.  I hate  slops  of any sort,
but when the system's consistancy fails, it really hits the cooling fan.

     They listened in stony silence, I knew they were rebuilding up  to
something.   One more job.  They wanted me to do one more job!  I would
have refused instantly, but it was my old arch enemy  Bad  Blox!   He'd
been  spotted by an Rms$Rundown lounging around the non-paged pool with
a couple of young Files.  He was good, I knew that much, by the end  of
the  night, he'd have their FAB's and it would be all over for them.  I
said I'd take the job, but on one condition, I had to have  a  partner,
and I knew just the one I wanted.  I'd known my partner to be for ages,
he used to run a halfway file for characters who were lost or  who  had
strayed  from home.  In the morning he'd put them on the unibus and get
the driver to take them home.  He was  a  retired  army  man  from  the
system  reserve.   I  gave General Register a call, and he said he'd be
right over.  I love it when a plan comes together!

     General Register came over in less  time  than  it  takes  to  dump
SYS.EXE at 75 baud onto an LA120 with a sloppy carriage.   Mind you,  he
was getting old, so I suppose that accounted for it.  He'd brought along
another old salt with him, Kernel Mode.   "It's a priviledge meeting you
sir" I said; we shook hands, and then got down to business.

     The General and Kernel went off to check out the system disk while
I  went  to see SWAPPER about trading in my wrecked IOSB.  I got one of
those new models, with the genuine 32 pixel dash,  TT$MNobrdcst  silent
muffler system, TT$MWrap in case I hit something, and, for drag racing,
a TT$MPassall.

     I tried to get a TT$Noecho but thought the better of it because  I
knew that it IS possible to get too much of a good thing.

     As soon as I had finished haggling with swapper over the  trade-in
price  of my IOSB I was out  looking  for  Bad  Blox.  I  sped  towards
the non-paged pool on my IOSB and looked around.  There was no sign  at
all  of  Bad  Blox,  so I knew that if I didn't act fast, someone would
regret it.  One by one I locked all the exits with my  $LCKPAG  in  the
hope that he was still somewhere on hand.

     I was right!  I was just about to $DISMOU my IOSB  when  I  saw  a
flash  of  a  CLI  callback in my VISOR.  I was thrown backwards by the
blast of a $EXPREG that operated from where my  IOSB used  to  be!  Two
IOSB's down in one week!   That was it!   Bad  Blox was really going to
get it.  I pulled out my Vital  Maniac  Stopper  (VMS).   It  had  many
functions and was a real gem when I came to dealing with problems.  Bad
Blox  was  trying to escape on  a  passing  process  control block.   I
switched  my  VMS  into Retaliation / Talk Later (RTL) mode and fired a
couple  of  Lib$Disablectrl's  at  him.   After  that he didn't stand a
chance.   With no control over the PCB he started wandering around like
the lost tribe of Israel.   I  blasted a Lib$Attach to  the  process so
that it would suffer no ill effects, then pushed the PCB into a special
jail  I  had made for him on the disk.   With him safely tucked away in
BADBLK.SYS it came to me like a flash;  I could never give up,  I would
keep  on  going  until I reached my cpu limit and then just drop out of
sight.

     But for now, I have to cruise them batch queues.

                ( More exciting adventures to come... )


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                      ---===*** Part II ***===---

        S. Travaglia, Computer Services  (~Late '86)



     Twas the night before BACKUP and  all  through  the  disk,  not  a
creature  was  stirring, not even a fatal IO error.  Because SRUMAN was
on the job, once more !!!

     Yes folks, it's SRUMAN, System Supporter Extraordinaire,  Defender
of  Diskquota,  Battler of Batch queues, Protector of Printouts, Basher
of Bugchecks, Hater of HALT instructions, Fighter for freedom  and  the
DIGITAL way...

     ..  We join our hero this time in an abandoned Run  Time  Library,
cleaning his shining new IOSB.

     My IOSB gleamed in the half-light like a head crashed  RM05  as  I
slid  it  out  of  the abandoned Run Time Library that was my new home.
One good thing about a revision is that you can pick up the  old  stuff
fairly  cheap.   Why,  my new digs had only cost me 301/304 blocks, and
what the hell, I was only saving them for a rainy day anyway.

     I kicked the IOSB into life and roared off down the system towards
my  destination,  the  batch  queues.  Definitely a seedy place, filled
with the sort of things you'd never take to your sys$login to meet your
parent  processes.   I hated going there, but sacrifices had to be made
if the system was to remain safe.

     After a while of cruising, I decided that there was nothing  amiss
so  I  decided  it was time to check out the non-paged pool.  Now there
was ALWAYS some action there, without fail;  The  EVL  finds  work  for
idle  processes...   Sure  enough,  as soon as I got there, I knew that
something was going down.  I just hoped it wasn't the system,  although
you never can tell...

     I prepared myself for action by loosening my  .44  calibre  vector
blaster  in it's holster, and changed mode to kernel inside my friendly
BASIC enviroment.  Quicker than you could type  'Jack  Robinson  forgot
his  password  here,  12  August 1982' I saw exactly what was going on.
Someone had been messing around with the FLOATING POINT,  only  now  it
had  sunk.   How dare they!  When the floating point drops, so does all
the hardware.  The system was UNSUPPORTED!  Quickly I located where all
the trouble was by locating the weakest spot.  Sure enough, there was a
BREAKPOINT right where I expected it.  I did some temporary repairs and
decided to get some skilled craftsmen down here to fix it later.

     But  before  that,  I hads to go right to the top  and  check  out
the  AST  LEVEL.   I liked it up here, it was all action, no-one wasted
any time, and you hardly ever ran into a loose page fault.  I ran  into
Exec  and User Mode (the Kernels younger brothers) on the way up.  They
had been asked by Kernel to  let  me  know  that  there  was  something
terribly  wrong with one of the system suburbs.  I asked them what they
knew, but they could only tell me that there had been a terrible  fight
down  at Micro Code Level and that the culprit had escaped to the BASIC
enviroment.  I decided to put the batch queues cruise on HOLD  until  I
had  checked  this problem out fully.  I was just about to leave when I
got a CLI callback from  somewhere  unknown.   It  said  'remember  the
force, young process saver'.  The voice !  It was my old Master, Opcom!

     I wrenched out my custom made XAB out of it's  holster.   Whenever
Opcom  said something to me, it was always a warning that something bad
was going to happen.  I didn't bother REPLYing  to  him  as  the  ready
light  on  my  XAB flicked to the deep red of a 11-750 error indicator.
Carefully, i moved to my IOSB.  All seemed well so far, I couldn't  see
what  Opcom  had  in  mind.   Maybe he was, like me, just getting a bit
short in the cpu department.

     I should have known to trust the judgement of  Opcom,  he'd  never
been  wrong  yet...  I started feeling uneasy, something EVL was in the
air.  Sure enough, Opcom was right, he must have had some REQUESTs  for
help  from  BASIC.   I  lept onto my IOSB and knew at once I had made a
mistake.  This was not my late model, and the  return  status  was  all
wrong.   I was in trouble and I knew it.  I narrowly avoided a Q-Bus as
the IOSB accelerated, out of control(^), towards the output buffers.  I
managed to control it long enough to steer it clear of the buffers, but
clipped a terminal driver and we went down...   I  abandoned  the  IOSB
just before it hit a physical buffer head on.  It was slightly damaged,
but I'd seen worse.  I ducked into the BASIC enviroment and  was  about
to change mode to  Kernel  again when  I  realised I had walked into an
asynchronous trap !  Damn, I was going so well, too.

     The culprits from micro-code level were all here, and I knew  that
I  had  better do something fast.  There was 15 of them altogether, but
it would take more than 15 to do me in !  AP was the first to  come  at
me,  he  didn't  stand a chance, as soon as he was within range, I just
PUSHed him onto the stack.  This shook SP up because  all  he  did  was
stand  pointing  at  FP.   But, as my bad luck would have it, AP POPped
right back up again.  It seems I hadn't pushed him  down  LONG  enough.
PC  came  at  me, though he seemed somewhat erratic, he came at me from
one side, but before hew could do any damage, I had him and AP at  each
other's throats.  They went down faster that an 11-730 with a fatal bug
check.  SP  was  still  out  of  action,  he just pointed  at  PC  now.
Next  came  the  registers.  I cleared that lot in no time.  Which only
left the big heavies PSL and  SP.   SP  looked  to  be  frozen,  but  I
couldn't  be  sure, but PSL was still in the fight.  My XAB was useless
against him, and I knew it.  If i ever got out  of  this  mess,  I  was
going  to have a LONGWORD with OPCOM about getting some new, up to date
gear.  PSL yelled something FAOL at me and moved  in.   I  grabbed  the
nearest  available  weapon, which was an old bootstrap that someone had
left laying around.  The bootstrap seemed to have a will of it's own as
it choked PSL into submission.  SP had given up, the shock had been too
much for him, he was ruined, and decided to end it all.  Before I could
stop  him,  in a fit of madness he lept into a register dump, where all
bad registers go to show themselves as they really are.  It was  really
quite sad.

     After that, I decided that I  had  had  enough  for  one  day.   I
decided to sink a few tinnies down at the cluster, a new place that had
opened up, system - wide.  Most of the working set ended up  there when
they were feeling a bit under quota.  It was just like old times, I ran
into epsilon and mantissa who were in  standard  form,  after  drinking
half  the  cluster  dry that morning.   I  told  them  about  the day's
activities and they made it their mission to cheer me up.  Epsilon gave
me  his  most  prized  possesstion,  something  that would stay with me
throughout my cpu time, his protection mask.  It was a real beaut  too,
made  in  the  days  when  processes  were  processes,  and  quota  was
unexceedable.  I, in return, gave him one of my souvineer  event  flags
that I had picked up when touring foreign systems.  We were having such
a good time reminiscing that we didn't notice a rather over  the  limit
vector  take  EXCEPTION  to  mantissa.  Before we knew it,  the logical
tables were sent flying as the vector moved in  on  mantissa.   Neither
Epsilon  nor myself were worried as we knew that mantissa used to be an
exit handler for the system services before getting  his  current  job.
Out  of the corner of my eye though, I saw one of mantissa's mates from
those days get ready should he be needed.   My  god,  it  was  the  top
hit-man, $DELPRC!  I sure hoped that mantissa would make the vector see
reason.   Luckily,  the  men  from  ASCII  (Associated  System  Combine
Incident  Inhibitors)  turned  up  before things got nasty.  Lucky they
were here, they usually spend most  of  their  time  on  the  Interrupt
Priority  Level,  keeping  things going up there.  They took the vector
away and we returned to our memories of  version  1,  and  how  we  had
changed.

     "Isn't the system wonderful manny ?"

     "Yep, S.R, it sure is isn't it..."

     "Hey Epsilon, remember that time you me, Sruman  and  those  three
...."

                            -=+ The End +=-


    With a clatter of cooling fans,  a twinkling of an ATTN light,
        and a hearty 'Hi Ho Diskquota', SRUMAN cruises again !
                                  S
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      S. Travaglia - Waikato University (- ~1987)
{ We join our hero at his part time job, as a janitor in the heart  of
the SYSTEM.}

     It was a cold and dark night on the Userdisk.  I don't know, it's
getting  harder  and harder to find my way around, what with directory
changes and version 4.1 to get used to.

     I hadn't had a good $HIBER in ages, as I was  worried,  something
was  going  on,  and I didn't know what.  I couldn't make the RUNTIME,
and nothing I would do would make the NETWORK.  But what the heck, I'm
the  System  Restriction  Underwriter MANager, I didn't have to bother
with minor repairs!  I still don't know why I took this part-time job,
I didn't need the diskquota, that's for sure.   I'd been left a sector
by one of my parent processes in an up-market section of the disk that
would take care of me until my final shutdown.

     I guess it's just that I had to stay active, as there wasn't much
on  for me at the moment.  I was seriously thinking of taking leave of
the System Services, just until I had time to $UNWIND.  But for now, I
suppose I have to $RESUME my duties as SRUMAN.

     I slowly wheeled my QIO out of it's space in my Run-Time  Library
garage.   The return status wasn't very good, which meant I would have
to trade it in soon; it just wasn't fair, they don't  make  them  like
they  used to!  Swapper would probably rob me blind as usual, but this
time I wanted to go up in the system.  I was getting to  long  in  the
CPU to be riding around the disks on a snazzy QIO.

     I rattled over to Swapper's  area  of  the  system,  and  cruised
around  the process block for a while, bugchecking things out.  I left
my QIO and decided to see what was happening.  A  cute  young  process
(obviously  in  compatibility  mode)  offered  to  take me back to her
PSIPAD and show me her firmware, but I was busy and had  other  things
on  my mind.  Like where Swapper had got to.  I asked around and found
that he was out!  Swapped out, what a bad break!

     I thought I'd just have a look around Swapper's sector anyway, to
see  if  I could see anything interesting, when who should walk up but
the man himself..  CPU!!!  What an event!  I almost wish  I  had  some
flags  to  set  up!   He  was  flanked by a couple of heavies from the
non-paged pool, probably real nasty too, but I didn't  want  to  check
with him, because he's strictly business, and you'd better have a good
reason before you interrupted him.  He was moving  quite  slowly  now,
and  oh  no!   He  HALTed  beside  me!!!  "How's it going SRUMAN?", he
$ENQed.  I had to be careful to avoid anything  that  might  make  him
angry,  otherwise  his  to heavies would take me for a long walk off a
short queue.  Quickly I assembled my thoughts, compiled my answer, and
linked  it  all  back  to  him  with  "Pretty  good,  CPU,  what about
yourself?", "Oh, I have my ups and downs" he replied "But hey, kid, if
you need a bit of Disk, just let me know...".

     He handed me a couple of chips.  "Thanks very much CPU"  I  said.
I  didn't want to offend him by saying that i didn't gamble, so I just
accepted psuedo-gratefully.  As soon as he wasn't looking,  I put them
in my CASE and made my $EXIT.

     I made one last search for swapper,  but it didn't seem to do any
good,  there  was  no-one  around.   So I jumped on the QIO and headed
towards the Batch Queues, a trip  that  was  just  about  sure  to  be
routine.   Sure  enough, it was about as alive as a 730 during a power
cut.

     Tired and disgruntled, I went home to rest.   But that was not to
be.   It  appeared  that  RA81, my next door neighbour had been really
spun down in the dumps and had head crashed himself.  Oh no!  He and I
went way back to the early versions.

     But wait, there was something suspect about the whole  thing.   I
knew  he  was Baud, but not that bad.  Something smelt faol!  I looked
around the keyboard for clues as to whether be fell  or  was  pressed.
Ah  Hah!   I found the [BREAK] I was looking for, just at the top left
hand side!  Someone had stretched  a  very  fine  peice  of  character
string across the accessway.  I knew who the culprit was as sure as if
he'd logged on!  LINE NOISE - the swine.  He was well known  as  being
terminal!   I  suppose it was his modem operandi that gave him away, I
had it all on file.  Just then the  scheduler  called.   "SRUMAN,  I'm
giving  this CASE to someone else." I was DECKed!  But he would accept
no arguements, not even p1.  "He was a friend of yours, so  we're  not
going to take the risk".  Well, that was that.  I've lost a grate FAL,
and they won't even let me DO anything about it WHILE the villian gets
away.   I couldn't wait FOR what Scheduler was going TO DO to me NEXT.
Looking back, I suppose I was in a but of a STATE.

     "Go and take a holiday in the BASIC enviroment,  come  back  when
your condition is better, we may have a JOB for you then..." Much as I
hated to leave DCL, I knew Scheduler was right.  I checked my  FOREIGN
$status  and left.  As soon as I got there, I couldn't wait to RETURN.
I must have been a fool to GOTO there in the first place.

     But wait, there was that cute process again from Swapper's  yard!
Maybe  things  were  looking  up  for  me!   Posing as being ON duty I
decided to GOTO her and ask to see her process id card.  She thought I
was a REAL CHARACTER and wanted to know what LENs I would GOTO to meet
her.  She said to give her a CALL later  on,  when  she  had  finished
here.  At least I got her NAME AS she left, it was MAG TAPE.

     Luckily I had time to CHANGE into something more comfortable, %IF
only  I  had  had TIME to %INCLUDE some of my night clubbing gear.  At
last I could WAIT no longer.  I CALLed her and she said she  would  be
RIGHT$ over.  Strange the way she pronounced her words...

     As soon as she came in I realised that my eyes had been decieving
me.   Her DIMensions were something to mail to SYSTEM about!  She said
she  would  love  to  go  on  a  DATE$  with  me.    There  was   that
pronounciation  again!  I told her to wait by my QIO WHILE I LOCked my
room.

     I  couldn't  HELP/NOPAGE/NOLIBLIST/USERLIBRARY/NOPROMPT  thinking
that something was wrong with her.  Before I could PUT more thought to
it though, i heard her screams.  "SAVE me, SAVE me Sruman!" she cried,
"He's  going to take me back to his PLACE$ if you don't".  It was LINE
NOISE!!!!!  I'll KILL him!  MAG was just down a couple of levels, LINE
NOISE  had her CHAINED to a large IMAGE.  There was no-where she could
RUN to.  "Move and it's the END for her!!!" he  yelled.   "He'll  KILL
me"  MAG  ECHOed.   I  was  getting really %CROSS!!!  Slowly I drew my
SUBEND out of my pocket, waiting for my chance to let him have it.  He
slipped  on a pile of RECORDs some SPACEd out MODifier had left on the
steps.  Quick as a FLUSH, I fired twice.  >SUB SUB!<  LINE  NOISE  was
truncated  off the edge of the array.  "I do DECLARE!" he whispered as
he dropped into oblivion.

     "Oh!  Sruman!" Mag purred, "You're such a hero!".  It was a tough
job  I  suppose,  but  hell, somebody had to do it.  "Let's GO back TO
your PLACE$, and you can RECOUNT some of your adventures, and  we  can
see  if  we have a lot in COMMON..." Warning bells started clanging in
my memory, but I could never RECALL more than one thing once I left DCL.

     I  told  her  I  wasn't  feeling  very  well  after  the  night's
activities,  which  of  course  wasn't true, but I needed TIME to SORT
things out.  "But i Think I like you," she said, "LET me stay...".   I
was  sure  something  fishy  was going on.  "I'm too variable for you,
dear", I said, "it's best that you find someone more constant" In less
time  than it takes to crash a 780, she had thrown me on the MAT.  She
had gone ABSolutely MARbles.  "Have it your own way" she snarled, "But
my boyfriend was right, it's time you LEFT$ for good"

     It all came back to me!!!  The character strings!!!  It was  her!
It  was  LINE NOISES girlfriend, STRING CONSTANT.  I was a blind fool!
She gave me a PROD$ in the PCB that got me seeing wildcard characters.
I'd  had  enough  of  this!  Tricked at every turn!  Well, no more!  I
didn't have the heart to knock her off with my SUBEND, so I set it  to
exit instead.  She went out like a RUN light.

     I decided it was time to go back.   I had less work BEFORE I took
a [BREAK]!  This place was such a DUMP, all the MAPs were out of date,
and XLATE was the last straw (and command, for that matter).

     I came out of BASIC on a roll.  I called a few of my  mates  from
the  peripheral  contigent and decided to have a parity.  As they say,
parity begins at home, and this one sure did.  I left the  peripherals
to  their  own  devices  for  a  while  to  get some fresh temperature
controlled, moisture free, ventilation.  A few of them joined  me  and
we  decided  to  go  for  a  device  pizza.   A cluster-sized one with
everything.  We jumped into console's vehicle, a brand new  SMG!   Now
this was really something.  How he MANAGEd to SCREEN this vehicle from
his wife I'll never know!   It  had  everything,  a  POPVIRTUALDISPLAY
which  we  opened  immediately,  a PHYSICALCURSOR, for careless device
drivers, an ALLOWESCAPE emergency exit, a CANCELINPUT  for  back  seat
drivers, and if that didn't work, a DISABLEUNSOLICITEDINPUT!  I didn't
believe it!  It even had a toilet with an automatic FLUSHBUFFER.  This
was the ride for me!  WINCHESTER wanted to be in control, but he'd had
too many buckets earlier on in the peice, so I said "Let TAPE  DRIVE".
Someone  asked  if  it  would  be  best  to order before we got there.
"WRITE, RING ahead will you ?" I called.  Then we were off.   As  soon
as  we  got to the $FABSTORE, I wandered up to the program counter and
asked the voluptuous process for our order.  A printer sidled  up  and
made  some  comment  about  her poor cleaning of the page table in the
order.  He was definitely out of line!  "Watch your mouth DOT  MATRIX"
she  warned.   What a putdown!!!  He wasn't about to BANDy  words with
her.   He  looked  like  getting  viscious so I stood up, and all of a
sudden he lost his form.

     Sruman!, Tape warned, but I was damned if i was going to  BACKUP.
Luckily  the printer decided to leave.  "We'll meet again", he said as
he left.  I did meet up with him again, but that was another story...


    Vax, the final frontier.  These are the cruises of the System
    Supporter, SRUMAN, his lifetime mission,  to boldly go  where
    no processes have gone before, to seek out strange, new, disk
    acesses, and catalogue them.

                Sruman, Part IV

(Simon Travaglia - University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, Late '87)

    The tie fighters  streamfixed out of the Batch queues towards me,
    what could I do, I DUMPed myself onto the disk, in search of some
    strong  MOUNT/ASSISTance.   I ducked into a darkened subdirectory
    just as they veered around after me, but I was too quick for them
    and they had lost me.  Now to find out  where  on  disk I was.  I
    flipped on my ATTN lights and peered about.   In the far corner I
    could see a PHONE, in fact in all corners there were PHONES.   Oh
    no, a PHONE DIRECTORY ! ! !  It would take powers greater than my
    own to tear these apart ! ! ! ! !

    Before I could move a strange sort of silence descended....

    HERE::DEFAULT   is phoning you so answer     (00:00:00)

    HERE::DEFAULT   is phoning you so answer     (00:00:00)

    Uh - oh, this meant real trouble...  Quicker than you could say
    PHONE/SWITCH="<ESC>" ANSWER, I was talking to DEFAULT, THE boss.
    DEFAULT was the top "man" of the system,   she was old and wise,
    and, what was worse, very, very hard on my fore-runners.

    "Well",  she said,  "What  have you got to say about your poor
    PERFORMANCE in the latest uptime?"
    I was dreading this, I knew it was coming, what could I say?

    "3^2, but that's just an expression" I replied but she wasn't
    going to take that sitting down

    "You're getting lax SRUMAN,   look at what you've got yourself
    into..."
    She paused, thinking for a moment, and carriage returned with -
    "That's it, I'm sending you to look after my cousin, Eunice"

    Oh no, "God help me!" I cried

    (Not that I believed in god, being diagnostic...)

    "No Buts, P1's or foreign commands" she said, "you're going now..."

    Before I could change mode to Kernel, I was gone.  I was ... HERE.
    EUNICE was there to meet me, with her man of the hour.  Time to be
    debonnaire, I thought...

    "Hi there EUNICE, up to your ULTRIX again i see..."
    (thank you, thank you, I deserved that)

    Went over like a fatal bug check...

    "Well, I see you've come out of you shell since you were last here"
    she replied...

    Time to get down to business, I wanted out of there, as I didn't want
    to put up with any MORE than I had to.  Oh MAN, these puns are MCR bad!

    "Whats the story, Eunice, why was I sent here?" I gets'd

    "Well, to tell you the truth , we are having daemon problems again,
    he's being very nasty, playing nasty tricks, /etc /etc /etc"

    "What do you want me to do?" I gets'd again

    "I want you to fseek him out, fflush him out into the fopen, and
    then ftell me about it.  If I can spare the ftime, I will fwrite
    him off then"

    What a disgusting speech impediment!

    "Well, I suppose I had better start now, I'll sscanf the disks for
    him and see if I can catch his ssignal" I stated.  Yuk, it appeared
    that I was coming down with the same disgusting habit.

    I sprintf'd off to the printf queues to see if daemon had been modfying
    anything there, but it all looked clear to me.

    I hated this place, it was so cramped, pipes everywhere.  /etc/passwd
    seemed to be the ROOT of the problem.   I chdir'd to another place to
    see if there was any sign of him.   Not a solitary cookie program.  I
    had to go into disguise.   I appeared to be the lack of headware that
    singled me out, everyone had the same SORT of headgear on, although I
    couldn't see why they were wearing them  as they seemed  to  hurt  so
    much, it brought people out in curses.   Nevertheless,  I  put  on my
    termcap.   Bugger!,  Damn!   Nope, I wasn't going to put up with this
    just to remain inconspicuous...

    I threw the termcap into the /bin.   But wait, did I C what I thought
    I saw.   There was daemon,  and he was giving me the /bin/finger.   I
    troffed as I had never troffed before.  I reached for my...,   Oh no,
    DEFAULT had forgotten to #include my submachine patcher!!! (Mind you,
    it wasn't all that portable anyway).

    "A scourge on you and your child processes" I yelled

    And then, like lightning hitting a VMZ,  it came to me.  Ah!!  Am I
    brilliant, or am I brilliant?  The only thing  that  Daemon feared,
    the light of a ps -A.   It is a well known fact that if you catch a
    Daemon appearing on a ps -A, he is forced to dissappear.  I knew it,
    I was going to brk him!

    I disguised myself as a lonely voluptuous process, and waited for a
    chance access.  I chd'd to /usr/games, I knew what he was like, I'd
    play his little game, the rogue.   This was turning out to be quite
    an adventure and I was pleased to trek the worm down.

    Before I could think up any more games for my monolog_file,  daemon
    appeared.

    "zork!" he cried

    An evil plan formed it my head!!!  While daemon was having a boggle
    I sorted it all out. "I like your format big boy" i said.  (I could
    almost see his knees go floppy)  The ps -A idea fell by the wayside
    as the nasty idea grew.  I sidled past him and hid a fork behind me

    As he moved in for the kill, I grabbed the fork command from behind
    my back and let him have it.   He  was  well  and truly forked now!
    He didn't really stand a chance...

    I gave EUNICE a call and told her all that had gone down.

    "Great work SRUMAN!" she cried, "You've saved us"
    (I began to hate myself, as there was no saving EUNICE...)

    "You can go HOME now..."

    "fabs!" I cried

    As I entered customs (and they have some very strange customs
    around here),  I started to get excited about returning to my
    own enviroment.  I decided to synchron with localtime so that
    I could have  some idea of what time had elapsed  since I had
    left.
                   ---

    The customs official looked at me with distaste as I said,
    "I have a declaration to make"
    "yes?" he asked
    "VAR X:INTEGER;" I said,  even though I knew he couldn't speak
    PASCAL!!!

        Aaaaaaghh!!!! It's so good to be back!!!


        (Join our hero next time in Sruman, part 5)


Na-na na-na na-na na-na
Na-na na-na na-na na-na
BATCHMAN!

    Bruce Swadeshoes and Robin Banks had caught the villans once
again.  I wish my life was as easy as theirs!  It was so easy on
the movies, all you had to do was load the batch queues and the
villans would come falling out!   They had no idea what it was
like in the real system.  They didn't have to pass descriptors
around the system to cache the criminals.   But, enough of this
recreation, its back to work for SRUMAN, System Saviour Extraordinairre!

            Sruman - Part V  (CCC_SPT @ Waikato Uni '87-88)

  It was a normal day on the system.  I hadn't seen any nefarious
activity at all, which in itself was pretty normal.  My psuedo
apprentice LINK was coming along fine,  although he tending to OBJECT
to the IMAGE that I had of him.  I think he  thought of me as some aged
wildcard,  unable to perform any more of the sensitive OPERations that
had made me a directoryhold name throughout the System.  And I think he
thought that I thought that he was a  wet-behind-the-input-buffers young
process who wanted fame,  fortune, and a steady income of quota.  And he
was right, although that was a hell of a lot of thinking.

       On the spool of the moment,  I decided to check out the tapes
as I had left  them  to  their own  devices  for quite a while now.
"There's a lot of intuition in this job,  it isn't always being in the
right place at the right time."  I may as well have been talking to
NLA0: for all the attention LINK was paying me.  Well, he would learn\
the hard way I suppose, everyone did.

We had just arrived when I heard a scream.  A tape mark shot past my
head and hit my young apprentice, who had halted at the noise.   "DUMP
yourself on the DECK!!", I $BRDCST'd but it was to late, another tape
mark hit him sparely in the input and blew his symbol table out.  I
dashed to his side, but I knew it was too late, his references were
crossed, and his header was a goner. Before he EOJ'd, he spoke

"Well ", he gasped, "it looks like I'm about to deassign/all for good..."

"Try not to write", I said while I looked for diagnostic to help me PATCH
him up.

"It's too late, SRUMAN,  I am going to that great SYSTEM in the sky,
where a process can run in peace, and there are no worries about primetime"
He gasped and slumped in my arms.   I knew he was gone, his file id faded
and his fixed length 512 byte records became unsequential.

I looked about for the culprit.  They had really got my BACKUP!  I
decided to take a look at the tape in question.  It didn't help me much,
she was foreign & we had troubles communicating.  That was, until we got
an EXCHANGE going.  She said she could identify the culprit.  Her name
was MSA0:, and she said she was a medium.  No problems, I thought to
myself, I mean just because every other medium I had come across was a
few bytes short of a block, didn't mean that she was too.   When she told
me who the culprit was, I knew she was a few nanoseconds slow in the cpu
department.  She said it was RSTS, and his dependant wife, RSX!  Everyone
knew that they had both perished in the great VAX/PDP  wars  at  the
beginning  of  the  system, although rumours had been circulated about
headerless file of RSX, creeping about [SYSEXE], never fully being at
rest, looking for vengence, and a proper rundown.

     The thought of these two being involved was ludicrous, even if they
were both active,  they would be several versions old,  especially RSTS,
and would have massive declining features to inhibit them.  I just hoped
that DCL didnt get byte of this, as he still had memory of his battles of
acceptance against RSTS, and he was likely to get nasty should the word
get parsed around.  MSA0 went on to say that she could feel through the
sub - ethernet, that they were  also responsible for the mysterious
dissappearance of the Mona LSI!

     Now that got me interested!!  A while back, some criminal had stolen
the famed  Mona LSI  from under my very nose,  and escaped into the reset
in some new-fangled gadget, fitted with a floating point accelerator.
I had searched all over the system, but could not find them, which of
course put me in a bad light with DEFAULT.  I could still remember the
blast I had got from her back and keyboard central (OPA0:). . .

"SRUMAN, you've made a real HASH of it!!!   I want you to POUND the
keyboards until you strike GOLD on this one.  I'm giving you a lot of
SPACE on this one but you will stay searching TILDA culprit is caught.
Now DASH off and ENTER the hunt..."


        Slowly I pieced together all that MSA0: could tell me.  It
was a LONG shot, but at least it was worth a try.  The theives and
murderers were hiding in a CONVERTed Run Time Library somewhere in
the system region.  "Sounds like my place" I mentioned, in parsing.

"WAIT 00:01:00!!!!" she cried!  "It IS your place!!!!"

   Of course!  That was the only place I wouldn't look, and of course,
by the TIME I got back, I would be tired, and wouldn't stand a chance.
They would have me block, bucket and cylinder.  But now, that was not
to be!  I made a call to someone who was guaranteed to want to be in on
it.  She said she'd round and meet met around the board from my home
block.  When I got there, DELTA TIME was waiting for me.   She had been
severely put out after the MONA had dissappeared,  and I was sure that
she was going to use a few tricks that her father DELTA (of sys$library)
had taught her.

"Ok, DELTA, you lock the pages round the back,   while I got rid of the
entry point round the front." I said.  This was going to be a synch!

I crashed through the entry point, showing my mask briefly to the
Super-Visor as I flashed past.  I spotted them down in the den(sity).
It WAS them!!!

"Freeze RSTS and RSX before I blow your bytes to bits!", I screamed

They started MOVing towards me.

"I'm serious,"   I said,  "This is  a submachine  patcher,  one of the
meanest weapons ever devised after your time, and you don't stand a
chance against it"

They kept coming.

I fired a warning shot through RSTS's head.  (I never did MCR play fair)
RSX kept coming towards certain expiry as  RSTS dissappeared in a cloud
of greasy, black smoke,  along  with  some  dwarves he must have brought
with him for the ADVENTURE.

"RSX, i don't want to do this..."

She kept coming so I fired again.    The blast parsed straight through
her and took out one of the boards in the wall.  Damn it, this psipad had
cost me a packet, and I didn't want it ruined!

"I have my rights!" she screamed

What a load of crap, I didn't know one acl that could identifier!

"I want a proper rundown!" she demanded

So that was it!   She was only after a proper rundown,  and then she
would let us be!  Well, far be it from me to rundown an image, but this
was an emergency as my Submachine patcher had no effect on her.

"Gees RSX is slow, and it's so hard to use, most of the programs running
under it are obsolete anyway, and ...."

"How dare you!" RSX cried, moving in on me

A flood of enlightenment came to me as I realised she meant RMS rundown.
But it was too late, she was coming towards me, bent on vengence!  Just
as she was about to shutdown my operations for good,  DELTA burst out
>From behind the LIB$RADIX_POINT, scattering LIB$CURRENCY all over the place

"Hold it RSX, I'm armed with a 11/34 LAT driver, and I'm NOT afraid to
use it"

RSX turned to wreck her terrible wrath upon her, but she was too slow, a
blast caught her and she dissappered forever... (If only...)

                -----------------

Once more the system was safe.   I think I may yet team up with DELTA,
I went to see her father about it, but he's a bit long in the CPU
department and just sat around saying EH? all the TIME.  Meanwhile we
would go on holiday, leaving no return address; let someone else look
after the system for a few microsecs, We deserved a rest!



            Sruman - Part Vi (1988, S. Travaglia)

There is a massive vending machine here.  The instructions read:
"Drop coins here to recieve fresh batteries"
N
You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
U
You are in a maze of little twisty passages, all different.
SW
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
D
You're at west end of a long hall.
S
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.

AAAaaaagh!
I woke from $HIBER with a START/QUE.   That dream had been a real
ADVENTURE!!  I thought I better get checked up before things got worse,
these ROGUE dreams were becoming a bit of a BOGGLE to my systems analyst.
I decided to TREK over and C he was still in his DUNGEON.  The good thing
about Zork was that he really WAS a part of his dungeon.   I  decided  to
WORM my way past the WUMPUSes he had set  up  to  stop  his  competitors'
hit-processes  getting  to him and making a MONOPOLY of the analyses.
One of the particularly eager ones started following me when I heard a
voice from the ORB above:

"BACK, GAMMON, it's SRUMAN, he's a customer"

Thank goodness!!!   I didn't want my CASE made public,  as wumps had a
HOBBIT of being a little less than case sensitive when talking to people
about Zork and his customers.  The last thing I needed was rumours.

He had my file out when I got there and was looking through it. "Still
having the bad dreams SRUMAN?" he $ENQ'd

"Yes, worse than ever this morning" I REPLYd

"Well, I am sorry to say this, but I think that you've overextended
your fields once too often SRUMAN" he said sadly

"What are you trying to say?" i asked.

"LAT me see if I can put this in longwords you would be able to parse"
he said, thoughtfully.  "I think you've been part of the working set
too long.  You just can't work to the extent that you used to.."

That was quota statement!

"I think you should stay here for a while.  In fact, I insist upon it!!!!"

The next thing I knew, I was in a field on the west side of big white
house...  NO!!!!!  This called for stern measures!   Heh heh, Zork had
not noticed my well hidden poker.   Quickly I stabbed at the fabric of
the game, getting thru to GDT level.  I quickly turned off the cyclops,
death,  robber and troll,  and called INIT.  A sinister, wraithlike
figure attempted to stop me.  "One move and it's CANNON for you" I warned.
The sinister figure halted, frightened.  After all, CANNON was the Siberia
of the games world. "Return me!" I instructed.  "Very well" he said, and
raised his oaken staff.  The darkness became all encompassing and my vision
failed...

   Next thing I knew, I was back in the system.  Now to deal with Zork.
He must have had some plan up his firmware for a long time,  and at last
decided to try something, hence getting me out of the way.  Well it wasn't
going to be that easy!  He would know I was back, so I temporarily MOVd
out of my Home,  and left no return address.    But it left me with the
problem of somewhere to go for the night until I could get DECNET to help
me with this task.  With a job like this, you couldn't be too picky though,
so I might need to stay with mth$random, even if it was a little seedy.
Random was pleased to see me, as he still remembered how I had got his
sight back for him after some process had tried to get it when calling
RANDOM-EYES through BASIC.  {Ok, so the puns are getting worse}   He got
me settled in and then I decided that it was time to make sure I had some
backup. I gave KMS-11 a call.  He said he'd bring his brothers  10, 9, 8,
7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, if a little extra hardware was needed.  That was
sorted!  I decided to get some entertainment.  Random had one of his
private dancers come in.  She was a cute little starlet,  she did her
welcoming ROUTINE,  which appeared to be the standard PROCEDURE at one
of these FUNCTIONS.  Some music started, she was going to sing.  As she
stepped up to the microcode,  I couldn't help but notice her voice that
flipped my login flag to captive. She spoke perfect DECTALK, without a
hint of an accent!  This was amazing!

"Not so amazing Sruman" Random  said, reading my thoughts,  "She's a
third party Czech lookalike.  Come to the party tonight, at the harbour,
you'll get a chance to meet her there..."

I didn't care what she looked like, she was the one for me.   All these
years of searching the system for someone just like her!  Later on I
introduced myself to her,  but  it  appeared  she  had  seen  me already
at the Editors conference on Christmas EVE. "TPU too?",  I enquired,
keeping up with the MCR Play.  It was good to know that we shared some
memory.   We were leaving by the dual port when disaster struck.  Who
says disaster never strikes in the same place?  As we were heading to
my SMG convertable,  two  processes  grabbed  her,  while another one
attempted to subdue me with a kick to the symbol table.  Well, if that
was the way he was going to play..  I swivelled and kicked his bootlegs
>From under him, stamping on his PCB at the same time.   He  wouldn't be
up again in a hurry.  I was just in time to see her being driven off in
a utility,  probably analyze or copy by the look of it.   I grabbed the
process that had attacked me and shook him till his bit field rattled.
He told all.  It was Zork.  He had designs for her, the CAD.  Well I
wasn't about to let him get away with that. It was obvious he hadn't
expected me and had organised to take her by force.  That was the very
limit!  I cruised quietly around to Zorks place.  This was going to have
to be a quicky recce.  I smothered my face in solder and crept through
the grounds.  The Wumpus's  never  knew  what hit them,  except that it
wasn't the arrow that they had grown to expect.  I sidled up to the
window to take a closer look.  Too late I realised that something was
wrong, it was quiet, too damn quiet,  some* was in the process of
happening.   A  flying  floppy swooped towards me from out of the sky.
I hurtled away as another flew directly at me.  I'd heard of people
being persued by the media,  but this was ridiculous!   I should have
realised what it was all leading to, but I stumbled blindly into an
asynchronous trap.  Zork was, or at least appeared to be, pleased to
see me.  "Where's my girl you, you, BASIC INTERPRETED ACCOUNTING PROGRAM?",
I cried.   He flinched at the terrible insult I had flung at him.   There
was only one thing a man of honour could do now, and surprisingly enough,
Zork did it.  He slapped his glove across my entry mask and threw it on
the floor.  I was only too happy to pick them up,  as they were mine
in the first place, the theif!

   Back to back we stood, I had had the choice of weapons, and had
chosen the older style DELTA modifiers,  mainly because you had to
acquire the knack to use them, and I hoped Zork didn't have the skills.
I had hedged my bets by unsetting the modifier flag on his, under the
guise of choosing which weapon.   We spun as one, but he didn't even get
his aimed by the time I had nulled his PCB.  "Where is the girl?" I
screamed at him as the deletion mark appeared on his face. "Your
CZECH is in the MAIL" he laughed, and then expired.

Oh no!  It couldn't be worse if I had dreamed it!   I was completely
wrong about the Utility, it was MAIL.  I should have recognised it's
ungainly shape,  it's many and various patches!  This was terrible!
I cruised over the disk to where mail was parked.  Finding her was
easy, it was just getting her out, and getting the code right.
Carefully I invoked Patch with her IMAGE in my mind.  Two CPU hours
later,  she was out.   It had been a bit hard because halfway through some
boiling liquid had parted to reveal a device pool, full of dead devices.
I had covered it up, and kept on searching.   She was out now, and that
was all that I really cared about.  BEST TRY CONTIGUOUS, OWNER SRUMAN?
she enquired in fluent FDL.  She wanted to get concatenated to me!  After
a while I had to agree,  it was about time I hung up my patcher and
settled down anyway.  And we will live happily till our journals close...

            -----------------------------
               The very very very End
            -----------------------------


            Sruman, Part VII - The Final Chapter

It was a cold morning on the USERDISK.  I was just going for my morning jog
around the block; it was strange,  but 512 bytes never seemed so long in my
younger days.  Life was easy for me especially now that I had my contiguity
with MTAACP.   She was one in a 1E06!   And now that I had settled down,  I
had more time to spend with her.   It was a little hard at first, I sort of
felt naked without my submachinepatcher close at hand,  but as  SWAPPER had
said, female processes are strange things, they were one short in the login
flags and because of that, there was no accounting for them.

But back to my run.

     Old  RMS  habits  die hard,  and it was strange, but the USERDISK just
didn't seem right, something was definitely up,  but  I  knew  if I told my
syspicions to UMSMAN (he was my replacement),  you  could bet your UAF that
they would be diswelcome.   Well,  I  suppose he was  big  enough  to  look
after his own processes, although there was something about him that wasn't
all boolean.   Maybe it was just a bit of jealousy on my part,  I  couldn't
bear to see someone running what used to be my job quota.  Anyway, it never
paid to linger on fragmented disk.

   I was about to enter my library when I noticed some loop birds up on the
roof under the EVEs.  Damn birds were nested everywhere!  The strange thing
was,  they weren't clustered around my TPU window as they usually were.  My
senses flashed an alert at me.   Normally  they  were  clustered  around my
window  like  DEC  engineers trying to change a light bulb,  but  today  my
window was about as interesting as the front of an 8500.  Something was up,
and it wasn't my number!  I crept up to the MBA0:, my mailbox,  and slipped
out my handy DELTA Blaster and took the safety off with a quick "1;m".  The
.entry was ajar.    (Well,  actually,  it was a mask,  but it was ajar too)
As I burst through the entry I saw someone with some disguise over his face
(With MTAACP slung over his shoulder!!!!)  making  to  leave.   Carefully I
fired a couple of  ";B"s at him,  being careful to aim wide,  for  fear  of
hitting MTAACP.  That shook him!   He dropped her and ran.   I rushed after
him, but he was gone.  I gave UMSMAN a call, but he was out.   I  knew that
it was no time to be a vigilante, so I left a message from him to .call  me
when he got in.   MTAACP was in a terrible state,  and  looked like she was
about to crash, so I let her get some rest, we could talk later.   Before I
could think any more UMSMAN called.

"What's the problem, boy?" he $enq  (Boy!?!?!!!)
I  told  him the story, telling everything I knew.  Then MTAACP came in and
gave her version.
"I don't really think there's anything to worry about, ", he reply'd, "it
was probably just an isolated event, no need to hash your table about it..
After all, MTAACP is a pretty physical device", he added, leeringly.

  Well, there didn't seem to be anything to go on.  I went over everything
with MTAACP.   She tried to remember, and then it dawned on me,  when she
asked "Who was that masked man?"   OF COURSE!!!  The Phone Stranger!  Why
hadn't I thought of it  before?!   No wonder UMSMAN had  seen  nothing
suspicious,   the  Phone Stranger  had  probably disappeared before he was
old enough to realise!!  In a way I felt a little sorry for the  Phone
Stranger,  being forcably removed from PHONE like that, they say his
skeleton disguised as TRANSCRIBE,  still  lingers in  phone  somewhere,
possibly  to  be  given  back to him.  But until then he possesses the
processes of hapless accounts,  causing  random  strife.  Now all I had
to do was find out who he was...   UMSMAN  was probably no use to me, he
wouldn't know what to look for,  even  IF  he  believed  my story,  so I
looked through my list of heroes..  Of course, The Man from ANSI!  I gave
him a call (by reference)

     The poor guy had been in UNIX a bit long,  and was a few bytes short
of a block,  but  still pretty keen when I told him what was going on.
"core",  he said, and then something in EBCDIC I didn't understand. (He'd
obviosuly been flatting with Kermit too long as well).   But at least he
said he'd be right over.   Next thing I knew,  his SMG rolled up the the
drive.  I knew it was his he had custom plates, RS232.

   I enlightened him on the events flagged up to now.  "It just doesn't
seem to register with me", he said. (No surprises there,  he was a good
man to have to back you up,  but  about as fast as an LA34 printing
Starlet when it came to thinking).
Carefully I explained what had happened  to  MTAACP and what my suspicions
were.
"Wouldn't that corrupt your Boot Disk",  he mentioned sympathetically.
He had an idea, find out all the people without alibis...  Unfortunately,
there was one person who could help us with that.   It  was  with a heavy
heart that I called DEFAULT.

"WHAT DO YOU WANT SRUMAN?" she asked with uncharacteristic politeness.
I tried not to mumble.  "It's about the Phone Stranger, he's on the l.."
"YES, YES, I KNOW THE LIE OF HIS ARCHITECHTURE" she interrupted.
"I need to .locate all the people at that time"
"RUBBISH!" she said, having nothing to to with BINTIM,  "YOU KNOW THAT
IT'S NOT YOUR JOB ANY MORE, LEAVE IT TO THOSE MORE CAPABLE"
"MORE CAPABLE!!   UMSMAN wouldn't know boot block from a  process header!,
he   thinks native mode is when processes go round in grass skirts"
"ARE YOU SUGGESTING THAT HE MAY BE CORRUPT?"  she enquired wheedlingly.
"No, no, but he could be a little more process orientated" I REPLYd.
She paused a while, computing the odds (and evens)
"PERHAPS YOU HAVE HIT THE TAPE DRIVE ON THE HEAD" she said, startling me.
"TAKE A QUIET LOOK INTO IT"

Well, I suppose a BIT part is better than nothing.

ANSI and I set off to sus out what was up.   We cruised the Batch queues,
then the print queues, just in case we'd missed something first time
around. "Look at that",  ANSI said, pointing at a funny file entry.  "It's
covered with script of some sort.   Is it ASCII,  is it EBCDIC,  NO IT'S
SUPERSCRIPT!  - Yes it's SUPERSCRIPT, strange visitor from another printer!
Superscript, with it's height and size shaping powers . . . "

ANSI ran on like this for a while, but I just unplugged myself and tried
to think of the best way of dealing with the situation.    ANSI  had
obviously dropped a bit of handshaking in the old mental block...  Poor
guy.  But wait!!!
What was that?   There WAS something funny there.   A character floated
over to us at about shoulder height.
"What seems to be the problem SRUMAN, ANSI?" it asked
"Who are you?" I asked impolitely
"Superscript, weren't you listening?  Superhero at your service",
He REPLYd

Not  another  one!   I remembered back to the good old days when there
was just one superhero, me.   This was all to much!   They're 10 to a
block now!  It was enough to make you RMS rundown.

"In fact",  he said  "I've been waiting for you to call,  I have a
cli$_present for you", reaching into his glyph.

   Staring into my submachine patcher seemed to $pause him. "No false
MOVs" I said pulling back his glyph,  and exposing a truly crooked
character.  I took from him a PCB munger, an illegal weapon in this system.
"Ok Super-Zero, start talking" I said.
"Never!" he screamed trying to $BRKTHRU my guard.  It was very messy...
"I never would have guessed that Superscript was a crook",  ANSI echo'd,
"Not when he and UMSMAN were so close"
"Well, you can't judge a font by it's glyph", I REPLYd, and then it hit
me!!!! Damn it all!!!  TRANSCRIBE had dissappeared about the same time
UMSMAN was conceived!  His parent processes being dead and unknown.  He
was the masked process.  I had to get back to MTAACP, she was in terrible
danger.   Who better to know what was what, when she downloaded all the
software!  (Mind you she had plenty of software of her own)
I left RS232 to inform DEFAULT, he could take the strain, he was one
hard copy, As I rushed off I heard  "Make it quick RS232,  this  better
not be a serial" Down through the mainframe I rushed,  past the trendy
Instruction set, past the statue of Ram and Rom, the two brothers,
brought up by an IBM, founders of the system, into my home block.
Not wanting to go through the front way,  I  climbed the binary tree to
look in the TPU window.  Just as I thought, UMSMAN, the meglomanic fiend!!!
I opened fire with my Submachine patcher.   His user friendliness blown away,
he stumbled out.
I leapt through the window to OPA0, I mean console, MTAACP.
She was Ok, I made to pursue UMSMAN.
"LEAVE HIM, SRUMAN", DEFAULT said, appearing from nowhere. "HIS USER
FRIENDLINESS IS DESTROYED, NOT THAT IT WAS ANYTHING FANTASTIC IN ANY
CASE. THAT SHALL BE HIS PUNISHMENT; NO PROCESS CONTACT EVER AGAIN.
YOU ARE RE-EMPLOYED."
She dissappeared.

Well, it was good to be back on the job!

        ==================================================
            That's it, this really is the end.
        Simon Travaglia ([e-mail])  Late 88
        ==================================================



----------------------+-------------------------------------------------------
 -Simon P Travaglia-  | [e-mail], (NZ-PSI) 71000004::CCC_SPT  +
University of Waikato | internet# 130.217.64.3 {truth}, 130.217.64.32 {grace}+
Hamilton, New Zealand | Request: Send me your games, I need them to survive  +
----------------------+-------------------------------------------------------
If all the world's a stage, I want to operate the trap door.  -- Paul Beatty