Just For Fun
JustMe-owner
Programmer Humor
Micro was a real-time operator and 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, 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 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 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 conversational mode and
expanded on ambiguous arguments while micro gave the occasional
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 voltage
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!"
>From You've Got Laughs! The Big Book of Internet Humor by Al Lowe,
coming soon from Alexander Books, www.abooks.com