by Eddie Currents
One night when his charge was pretty high, Micro-Farad decided to seek out a cute little coil to help him discharge.
He picked up Milli-Amp and took her for a ride in his Megacycle. They rode across the Wheatstone Bridge and stopped by a Magnetic field with flowing currents
and frolicked in the sine waves.
Micro-Farad, attracted by Millie-Amp's characterisic curves soon had her fully charged and proceeded to excite her resistance to a minimum. He gently laid her at
ground potential, raised her frequency and lowered her reluctance.
With a quick arc, he pulled out his high voltage probe and inserted it in her socket, connecting them in parallel. He slowly began short circuiting her resistance shunt
while quickly raising her thermal conductance level to mil-spec. Fully excited, Milli- Amp mumbled "MHO...MHO...MHO"
With his tube operating well into class C, and her field vibrating with his current flow, a corona formed which instantly caused her shunt to overheat just at the point
when Micro-Farad rapidly discharged and drained off every electron into her grid.
They fluxed all night trying various connectors and sockets untill his magnet had a soft core and lost all of its field strength.
Afterwards, Milli-Amp tried self-induction and damaged her solenoids and with his battery fully discharged, Micro-Farad was unable to excite his field. Not ready
to be quiescent, they spent the rest of the evening reversing polarity and blowing each others fuses.
BUT WAIT!!! Theres M O R E !
Micro was a real-time operator and 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 S100 bus that morning),
when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware 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 was her name. 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, 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 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'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 Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous
arguments while Micro gave occasional acknowledgments, although in reality he was anyalyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally
settled on the old,'Would you like to see my benchmark routine?' but Mini was again one step ahead.
Suddenly 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 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 hangup 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 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, 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 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 about is hex."
----- T H E E N D ----- | 
