[cobra de capell]

Micro was a real time user and a 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 Micro arrived home just as the sun was crashing.
He had parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive. He had
missed the 5100 bus that morning, when he noticed an elegant
piece of liveware inspecting the daisy wheels in his garden.
"She looks user-friendly," he thought. "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 shifted over to her casually, admiring the power of her
twin 32-bit floating point processors, and inquired, "How
are you, Honeywell?"

"Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optic fibers
engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear
functions.

Micro thought about a recursive approach but 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 dumped
the results. "I've been put on a queue myself recently and a
rendezvous is just what I need to activate my tasks. I'll
park my machine cycle and meet you inside." She walked off,
leaving Micro admiring the way her dynamic resources were
allocated and thinking, "Wow, what a cache! I wonder if she's
available for prime time maintenance."

They sat down at the process table to a platter of fiche and
chips and a basket of baudot. Mini was in conversational mode
and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave continuous
acknowledgments, although, in background, he was analyzing the
shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally
decided on the old 'Would you like to see some of my benchmark
programs', but Mini anticipated his flow.

Without a prompt, 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 commanded. Micro was executing
firmware by this stage, but his hardware policing module had
an accelerated processor and was in danger of overflowing its
output buffer - a bug that Micro had been consulting his analyst
about. "Core dump!" he complained.

Micro auto-recovered, however, when Mini went down on DEC and
opened her divide files to reveal her data set ready. He
accessed his fully packed root device and was just about to
enter her kernal when she attempted an escape sequence.

"Abort!" she cried. "You're not shielded."

"Reset, baby," he said. "I've been debugged."

"But I haven't got my current loop disabled and I can't support
child processes," she protested.

"Don't run away," he begged. "I'll generate an interrupt."

"No, that's too error prone - and I can't abort because of my
design philosophy."

Micro was in phase locked oscillations by this stage and
could not be terminated. But Mini soon stopped his thrashing
by inducing a voltage spike in 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 about is hex!"