something for computer geeks... (fwd)

["Khanhtran N. Phan" <kphan@engin.umich.edu>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 10:48:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Smitty <clsmith@engin.umich.edu>
To: Carl Trent Wahl <dahmo@engin.umich.edu>, hkn-playpen@engin.umich.edu
Subject: Ya gotta read this (fwd)


>  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, and had
>  parked his Motorola 68000 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 though 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 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 8K,
>  "I've been recently 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 process table to a top of form feed of fiche and
>  chips and a bottle of Baudot.  Mini was in conversational mode and
>  expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
>  acknowledgements although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest
>  and least critical path 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
>  module 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 run away," 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 of is hex!"
>  
>  --
>  From the RHF archives as selected by Brad Templeton, Maddi Hausmann and
>  Jim Griffith.  This newsgroup posts former jokes from the newsgroup
>  rec.humor.funny.   Visit http://comedy.clari.net/rhf to browse the RHF pages
>  and archives on the web.