This is the story of Lexi Con (Lex for short).

Lex was feeling bored with life. He had tried everything, the first in/first out technique, using a re-enterant driver, he had even tried bottom up degeneration. So he decided to go to a baudy little place he knew, which was frequented by Kernels and other types of executive.

Lex shortly arrived at ADA's place. He entered the bar and ordered a short (beer might cause him to make too many shift lefts to the small node if he didn't overflow first) and sat down at a hash table.

After a while Lex spied the supervisor. Ada purported to be of a new generation but she looked as if she should have been archived years ago. Ada wandered over wiggling her peripherals as she came. He wondered if her upper quartiles were mainly silicon chips. "Core" he said, his stack was in danger of popping up.

"Hello" she said, she was obviously a monadic operator.

Lex decided to pay her a two's compliment, "that's a nice two you've got there."

"Would you like to return to my place for a byte?" she enquired.

Lex parsed her externals and decided it might be a new experience, "OK" he acknowledged. If he could improve his input/output control he might achieve a reasonable down time. They returned to her address.

"I must go in first to see if my husband Mark is here," she said.

"But won't he be working?" asked Lex.

"He's a redundant character" she replied and entered to do some Mark sensing.

She beckoned him in. In the corner was a strange bird. "That's an odd parity?" he said.

But she said nothing and took him in a deadly embrace. She squeezed him so hard he thought he might reach his breakpoint. She ran her digits over his external variables. He could feel his mantissa was about to achieve double length working. He wondered whether he might have an abnormal termination.

He pushed her away, "I must go for a soft dump first," he said, "where's the job control terminal?"

"Later," she said and pulled him towards her, "do you practice recursive entry?" she asked. So he placed his most significant digit on her entry point only to find she had some virtual hardware. She was a transputer! He uttered the vilest primitive he knew.

He pushed Ada away and left at a fast data rate. Just as well he hadn't tried an overlay on the testbed.

Driving home he went through an asynchronous system trap and was terminated by the police. The PCs approached him, "I've just been accosted by a transputer" he told them. They thought he was simplex.

"Maybe he was bi-directional, sir" said PC Chad.

"No way," said Lex "he was completely duplex."

"That was probably Cathode Ray," said the PC, "you may well have contracted a virus."

Subsequently Lex found his hard drive had been replaced by a floppy.

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