@7
          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 timesharing.  One evening he 
     arrived at home just after the Sun crashed and parked his Motorola 
     68000 in the main drive (he missed the S100 buss that morning and 
     the commute was too short to take a backplane).  He noticed an 
     elegant piece of liveware admiring his daisy wheels in his garden.  
     He thought to himself, "She looks user-friendly, I'll see if she'd 
     like an update tonight." 
          Mini was her name and she was delicately engineered with eyes 
     like COBOL and a Prime mainframe architecture that set Micro's 
     peripherals networking all over the place.  He browsed her over.  
     She looked like she could be sassy, but suspected that she had just 
     artificial intelligence. Casually admiring the power of her twin 32-
     bit floating point processors and polled, "How are you Honeywell?" 
          "I Be, MMMMM, well," she responded haltingly while 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 can get offset later on." 
          Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then 
     transmitted an 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 
     symbol!  I wonder if she liked my firmware?" 
          Mini and Micro paged into his address space and Mini asked for 
     the location of the bit bucket saying that, "I need to swap out for 
     a nanosecond to fix my cables." 
          Micro replied, "Down the channel, third device on the string," 
     but added, "In my cache, you don't look a bit SCSI." 
          They sat down at the process table on top of a form feed of 
     fiche and chips with a bucket of Baudot.  Mini was in conversational 
     mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional 
     acknowledgements, although in the background, 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 one step ahead.  Suddenly she was online and 
     stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full functionality of 
     her operating system software.  "Let's get down to BASIC'S, you 
     RAM," she cried.  Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware 
     policing module had a processor of its own and was in danger of 
     overflowing it's output buffer.  (A hang-up that Micro had consulted 
     with 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 divided 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. 
          "NAK!  NAK!" she cried.  "You are not properly shielded.  I 
     haven't got my current loop enabled and I don't want to spawn 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 because of my design
     philosophy."
          Micro was locked in by this stage though, and could not be 
     turned off.  Mini soon 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 though as she compiled herself and called for 
     a carriage tape.  "All they ever think about is HEX." 

@9