All those computrers ever think about is hex!
         ---------------------------------------------

Micro was a real time operator,  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 he arrived home, just after the Sun was crashing, and
parked  his  Motorola 6800 in the main drive (he had  missed  the
S100  bus  this  morning),  when he noticed an elegant  piece  of
live wire admiring the daisy wheels in his garden.

He thought to himself,  "she looks pretty 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 Honey well ? ". "Yes, I am
well",  she responded, batting her optical fibres 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 off set later on".

Mini  ran a priority for 2.6 milliseconds,  and then  transmitted
8K,  "I've been dumped myself recently,  and a new page break  is
just what I need to refresh my discs,  I'll park my machine cycle
in your back yard, 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  bucket  of  Beaudot.   Mini  was  in
conversational mode,  and expanded on ambiguous arguments,  while
Micro gave the occasional acknowledgements,  although in reality,
he  was  analysing  the shortest and least critical path  to  her
entry point.   He finallly settled on the old, "would you like to
see my benchmark subroutine?" but again Mini was a step ahead.

Suddenly she was up, and stripping off her parity bits, to reveal
the full functionality of her operating system software.

"Lets 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 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 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 noise spike into his main supply, where upon he fell over
with a head crash, and went to sleep, like a Swallow.

"Computers",  she thought,  as she re-compiled herself, "all they
ever think about is hex"....