Dec Wars - Chapter 3
A long time ago, on a node far, far away...XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX X X XX XXXXX XXXX X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X XXXXX X X X X X X X XXXX X X X X X X XX X XXXXXX XXXXX X X X X X X X XX XX X X X X X X XXXXX XXXXXX XXXX X X X X X X XXXX X
As you remember, Luke and the droids have joined PDP-1 to find Con Solo...
Luke, PDP-1 and the droids piled into Lukes vehicle (a floating point model). They raced across the disc until, off in the distance, Luke saw smoke rising from the spindle.
"Uh oh, looks like a bearing failure." exclaimed Luke. "Better call the service engineer."
"Don't bother," sighed PDP-1, "it's a head crash."
As they approached the scene, the total devastation became apparent. TTY fighters had strafed the surface, scraping off the oxide right down to the aluminum. After cooking the raw data, the External Storm Flunkies landed and finished the job by disassembling all the code that was still executing. There was nothing left alive at Lukes home.
"I want to become a Red-eye Night and cream the dastardly villains who did this." Luke resolved (shades of Snidely Whiplash).
The comrades set out west, or was it east, no...perhaps it was south-southeast (it's hard to keep track of directions when you are spinning at 3600 RPM). After traveling many sectors, the party finally arrived at the city of Bellabs.
"This place is filled with microprocessors." said PDP-1. "Every eight bit hood is trying to make a word, so watch what you say."
As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news, it was met by a newsgroup of Imperial protection bits.
"State your UID." commanded their parent process.
"We're running under /usr/guest. This is our first time on this system," said Luke.
"Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?"
"Uh..."
"This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root. "We can go about our business."
"This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about your business. MOV along!"
Off drove our heroes, a look of puzzlement upon Lukes face. "Why did the Flunkie let us go?"
"A small demonstration of ...
The Source ...!"
They drove to a bar that Con Solo was known to frequent. As they entered, Luke was amazed to see the seedier side of Bellabs. There was an 8080 with a TRS-80. A couple of 6800's talking to a 6502. A Z80 was vying for the 8080's date. In the corner sulked a 4004, eating data...nibble by nibble.
"We don't allow no droids in here." rasped the |tender.
As 3CPU turned to leave, he said "We will wait for you outside."
RS232, being ambidextrous, backspaced out the door.
"Lite beer!!? I sink a 100 foot well, for a friend, and all you serve is lite beer?"
"This is core's lite." said the |tender.
"RAM it!" demanded Con.
PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf!borman) to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by Imperial Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in search of a likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a collection of weird and exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones, ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all were drinking data at the bus.
"#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":>><" transmitted a particularly unstructured piece of code.
"He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine.
"Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
"I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."
"I'll be careful."
"You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine.
"This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobie, overlaying into Luke's address space.
"@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage protection. With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobie unlinked the offensive code. "I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us."
"The name's Con Solo. I hear you're looking for some relocation."
"Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this device."
"Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast enough for you, old version."
Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobie made their way to the temporary file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed, "What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!"
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