Re: Love Bytes
Message #12 Posted by VPN on 6 Apr 2005, 10:45 a.m.,
in response to message #11 by VPN
Love Bytes
(or sex and the single computer)
They say that computers do not think like human
beings. But do they feel like humans? A certain
computer, to which (to whom?) we have guaranteed
absolute anonymity, has supplied us with this peace of
computer-style hex-gossip that is going the rounds
of the sophisticated number crunchers in the web.
If you have an under-age computer around, on no
account let it see this - it might be totally diskusted(!)
and even corrupt it's little CPU forever!
Micro was a real-time operator and
dedicated multi-user. His broad-band
protocol made it easy for him to inter-
face with numerous input/output de-
vices, even if it meant time-sharing.
One evening he arrived home just as
the sun was crashing, and had parked
his Motorola 68060 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 C if she'd like an
update tonight."
Mini was her name, and she was
delightfully engineered with eyes like
FORTH and a Prime mainframe archi-
tecture that set Micro's peripherals
networking all over the place.
He browsed over to her casually,
admiring the power of her twin, 64-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 to-
night", 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
nanoseconds then transmitted "8K, 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'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 conversa-
tional mode and expanded on ambi-
guous arguments while Micro gave
occational acknowledgements although,
in reality, he was analysing the shortest
and least critical path to her entry point.
He finally settled for 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 functio-
nality operating system software. "Let's
get BASIC, you RAM", she said. Micro
was loaded by this stage, but his
hardware policing module had a pro-
cessor of its own and was in danger of
overflowing its output buffer, a hang-ip
that Micro had consulted his analyst
about. "Core", was all he could say.
Micro soon recovered, however, when
she wnet down on the DEC and opened
her device 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 escaper 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."
Micro was locked in by this stage
though, and could not be turned off. But
she soon stopped his trashing 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."
#EOF#
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