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To: John Carragher who wrote (14234)5/2/2000 9:29:00 AM
From: Carolyn  Respond to of 62567
 
Micro Meets Mini

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
continuation 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 kernel 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!"

~ Author Unknown ~



To: John Carragher who wrote (14234)5/2/2000 5:04:00 PM
From: Peter S. Maroulis  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 62567
 
A mother was preparing pancakes for her sons, Kevin, 5, and Ryan, 3. The
boys began to argue over who would get the first pancake.
Their mother saw the opportunity for a moral lesson. "If Jesus were
sitting here, He would say, 'Let my brother have the first pancake. I can
wait.'"

Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, "Ryan, you be Jesus."

-------------------------------------------------------------------
A father was at the beach with his children when his four-year-old son
ran up to him, grabbed his hand, and led him to the shore, where a seagull
lay dead in the sand.

"Daddy, what happened to him?" the son asked.

"He died and went to Heaven," the dad replied.

The boy thought a moment and then said, "Did God throw him back down?"

-----------------------------------------------------------------

After the church service a little boy told the pastor, "When I grow up, I'm
going to give you some money."

"Well, thank you," the pastor replied, "but why?"

"Because my daddy says you're one of the poorest preachers we've ever
had."

------------------------------------------------------------------

A wife invited some people to dinner. At the table, she turned to their
six-year-old daughter and said, "Would you like to say the blessing?"

"I wouldn't know what to say," the girl replied.

"Just say what you hear Mommy say," the wife answered.

The daughter bowed her head and said, "Lord, why on earth did I invite
all these people to dinner?"

------------------------------------------------------------------

A mother was teaching her three-year-old The Lord's Prayer. For several
evenings at bedtime, the child repeated it after the mother. Then one
night the child was ready to solo. The mother listened with pride to the
carefully enunciated words, right up to the end.

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail.
Amen."

--------------------------------------------------------------

A minister dies and is waiting in line at the Pearly Gates.
Ahead of him is a guy who's dressed in sunglasses, a loud shirt,
leather jacket, and jeans.

Saint Peter addresses this guy: "Who are you, so that I may know whether
or not to admit you to the Kingdom of Heaven?"

The guy replies: "I'm Joe Cohen, taxi driver, of Noo Yawk City." St.
Peter consults his list. He smiles and says to the taxi driver, "Take this
silken robe and golden staff and enter the kingdom of Heaven." The taxi
driver goes into Heaven with his robe and staff.

Now it's the minister's turn. He stands erect and booms out, "I am
Joseph Snow, pastor of Calvary for the last forty-three years."

St.Peter consults his list. He says to the minister, "Take this cotton
robe and wooden staff and enter the Kingdom of heaven."

"Just a minute," says the minister. "That man was a taxi driver, and he
gets a silken robe and golden staff. How can this be?"

"Up here, we work by results," says Saint Peter. "While you preached,
people slept; while he drove, people prayed."

------------------------------------------------------------------

A little boy opened the big and old family Bible with fascination, and
looked at the old pages as he turned them. Suddenly, something fell out
of the Bible, and he picked it up and looked at it closely. It was an old
leaf from a tree that had been pressed in between the pages.

"Momma, look what I found," the boy called out. "What have you got
there, dear?" his mother asked. With astonishment in the young boy's voice,
he answered: "I think it's Adam's suit!"

------------------------------------------------------------------
The preacher was wired for sound with a lapel mike, and as he preached,
he swerved briskly about the platform, jerking the mike cord as he went.

Then he moved to one side, getting wound up in the cord and nearly
tripping before jerking it again.

After several circles and jerks, a little girl in the third pew leaned
toward her mother and whispered, "If he gets loose, will he hurt us?"

------------------------------------------------------------------

Six-year-old Angie and her four-year-old brother Joel were sitting
together in church. Joel giggled, sang, and talked out loud. Finally, his big
sister had enough. "You're not supposed to talk out loud in church."
"Why?
Who's going to stop me?" Joel asked. Angie pointed to the back of the
church and said, "See those two men standing by the door? They're
hushers."