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Software Goes Hardware
Author: -unknown
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 did mean time-
sharing. His links with authors and
editors connected him with many of
Silicon Valley's expert systems and
artificial intelligentsia.
One evening, just as the Sun was
crashing, he arrived home and parked
his Motorola 68000 in the main drive
(he had missed the S-100 bus that
morning) and noticed an elegant piece
of liveware admiring the daisy wheels
in his garden. "She looks user-friend-
ly. I'll see if she'd like an update
tonight," he thought to himself.
He browsed over to her casually, ad-
miring the power of her twin 32-bit
floating-point processors. Even her
parms were parsed! He hadn't seen
structured lines like this since his
PROM. "How are you, Honeywell?" he
asked.
"Yes, I am well," she responded,
batting her optical fibers engagingly
and smoothing her console over her
curvilinear functions.
Mini was her name, and she was
delightfully engineered with eyes like
COBOL and a Prime mainframe architec-
ture that set Micro's peripherals net-
working all over. Fears of becoming a
Unix were soon fading like vaporware.
Micro settled for the straight-line
approximation. "I'm standalone tonight
and looking for an assembly," he said.
"How about computing a vector to my
base address. I'll output a byte to
eat, and we could offset later on."
Mini ran her priority process for
2.6 milliseconds, 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. "Wow! What a
global variable! I wonder if she'll
like my firmware?" Micro thought.
That night they sat down at the
process table for a form feed of fiche
and chips and a bucket of Baudot. Mini
was in a conversational mode and ex-
panded an ambiguous argument while
Micro gave occasional acknowlegements,
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" subroutine. But Mini was
one step ahead. She was suddenly up
and stripping off her parity bits to
reveal the full functionality of her
operating system software!
"Let's get BASIC, you RAM, and go
for some downtime on the spreadsheets"
she panted. Micro was loaded by this
stage, he was afraid his software
wouldn't respond. Fortunately, his
hardware-policing module had a pro-
cessor of its own, but it was soon in
danger of overflowing its output
buffer -- a hangup that Micro had
recently consulted his systems analyst
about. "Core!" was all he could say.
Micro soon recovered, however, and
Mini went down on the DEC and opened
her device files to reveal her Data
Set Ready. His floppy was soon coming
up to speed. He accessed his fully
packed root device and was just about
to start pushing into her stack when
she executed an escape sequence by
popping back to level 1.
"Oh no!" she piped. "You're not
shielded!"
"Reset, baby," he replied, "I've
been debugged!"
"I haven't got my current loop
enabled, and I'm not ready to support
child processes," she protested. "That
would make me mother-bored!"
"Don't run away," he said. "I'll
generate an interrupt."
"No way! 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.
She soon stopped his trashing by in-
troducing 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 at the asynch. "All
they ever think about is hex."
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