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!"
|