Fwd: silly computer engineer story (fwd)
People here need to lighen up ;) Ok, take a look at this msg I was sent..
It's good for a laugh.
Chad
Chad D. Zimmerman
chad@dabcc-www.nmsu.edu
http://dabcc-www.nmsu.edu/~chad/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 1997 09:09:13 -0700 (MST)
From: "by way of Jon E. Juarez <jjuarez@nmsu.edu>"
<amazon@jaws.greatwhite.com>
To: chad@dabcc-www.nmsu.edu
Subject: Fwd: silly computer engineer story
This is obviously a computer-guy thing...
>
>>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 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 5100 bus
>>that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring
>>the daisy wheels in his garden. He though to himself, "She looks
>>user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."
>>
>>He browsed 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 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 8K,
>>"I've been recently dumped myself and a new page is just what I need to
>>refresh my disk packs. 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 a top of form feed of fiche and
>>chips and a bottle of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and
>>expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional
>>acknowledgements although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest
>>and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the
>>old line, "Would you like to see my benchmark subroutine?" but Mini
>>was again one clock tick ahead.
>>
>>Suddenly, she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the
>>full functionality of her operating system. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM"
>>she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing
>>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, as she prepared to log him off.
>>
>>Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and opened
>>her device files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully
>>packed root device and was 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!" she squealed. "That's too error prone and I can't abort because
>>of my design philosophy."
>>
>>But Micro was locked in by this stage and could not be turned off. Mini
>>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 compiled herself. "All they ever
>>think of is hex!"
>>
>>
>>
>>
>Donald Silver dsilver@dseweb.com
>Don Silver Enterprises 415-508-8940
>http://www.dseweb.com
>
>It's too bad stupidity isn't painful
>
>
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