This was erroneously credited to me in the June issue of CMMUG Bug
Bytes.  That was a miscue; I had sent it by modem to Dave Olson without
telling him where it came from, and a few days later phoned to tell him
that I had discovered it in ETC., the magazine of the International
Society for General Semantics. It was credited to Anonymous there.  But
in the meantime Dave had already published it under my name.

Anyway, I think it's a fine, high-tech story, and I can't understand why
any right-minded person would attach evil connotations to it, and I see no
objection to putting it on line if you wish.  Enjoy.

Wallace Kendall



                     A MODERN BEDTIME STORY

                        Author Anonymous
                
        Micro was a real-time operator and a dedicated multi-user.
His broadband 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.  He
parked his Intel 80486 in the main drive (he never used the S-l00 bus
any more) and 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."

        He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin
32-bit floating point processors, and inquired, "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 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 0K.

        "I've recently been dumped myself and a new page is just what I
need to refresh my disk packs.  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 ASCII table to a top of form feed of fiche
and chips and a bottle of Baudot.  Mini was in a conversational mode and
expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
acknowledgements, although in reality he was analyzing the shortest
distance to her entry point.  He finally settled on the old line, "Would
you like to see my benchmark subroutine?" but Mini was again one clock
tick ahead.

        Suddenly she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal
the full functionality of her operating system.  "Let's get BASIC, you
RAM!" she said.  Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware
policing system 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 as she prepared to log him
off.

        Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and
opened her device files to reveal her data set ready.  He accessed his
fully packed root device and was 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 backup," he said, "I'll generate an interrupt."

        "NO!" she squealed.  "That's too error prone and I can't abort
because of my design philosophy."

        But Micro was locked in by this stage and could not be turned
off.  Mini stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his
main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.

        "Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself.  "All they
ever think about is hex!"