Computer Sex

Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broadband protocol made it easy for him to interface with various input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing. One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and he 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’d like a date tonight”. Mini was her name, and she was delightfully engineered with eyes like COBOL and Prime mainframe architecture that sent Micro’s peripherals networking all over the place. He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin, 12-bit floating point processors, 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 stand-alone tonight” he said. “How about computing a vector to my data 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, “BK, I’ve been dumped myself lately and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disks. I’ll park my machine cycle in your back-ground 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 process table to a top-of-form feed of fiche and chips, and a bucket of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanding on ambiguous argument 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 get BASIC, you RAM” she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware polling module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its output buffer; a hangup that Micro had consulted his analyst about. “CORE” was all he could say. Micro soon recovered, however, when she sat down on his DEC and opened her device files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed her fully paced 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 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”. 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 thought as she complied herself, “all they ever think about is HEX”.