MICRO & MINNI.....a story with a jolt!
 
    Micro was a real-time operator and dedicated multi-user. His broad-band 
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 S100 bus that morning), when he noticed an 
elegant piece of livewire 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 ÿwas ÿher name, ÿand she was delightfully engineered with ÿeyes 
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'm well," she responded, batting her optical fibres engagingly and 
smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions."
    
    Micro ÿsettled for a straight line approximation. ÿ"I'm ÿstand-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 ÿran a priority process for 2.6 ÿmilliseconds then ÿtransmitted 
"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 
conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments 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 ÿshe 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 at this stage, but his hardware 
polling 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.
    
    Micro ÿsoon recovered, ÿhowever, ÿwhen she went down on the DEC ÿand 
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 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."
    
    Micro ÿwas locked in by this stage though, ÿand could not be ÿturned 
off. But she soon stopped his trashing by introducing a voltage spike 
into his mains supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went 
to sleep.
    
    "Computers," ÿÿshe thought as she compiled herself, ÿ"all they ÿever 
think of is hex."