A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)..... ********* D E C W A R S ! ! ********* From the adventures of luke vaxhacker episode n Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives only spoke BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33. "It needs and eia conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual) trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed on Con Solo's eyes as he whirled to face the parallel processor. "I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around any Imperial TTY Fighter. She's fast enough for you." "Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobie. "Two Bacco, here, my bookie." "Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent, or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves. Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see a write cycle coming down the unibus toward them. "Imperial Bus Signals!" shouted Con Solo. "Lets boot this popsicle stand! Tooie, set clock fast!" "Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out of here!" "Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space! I'll try to keep their buffers full." As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters appeared around the milliamp falcon. "they're firing!" shouted Luke. "can't you do something??" "The jump into system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!" "In three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie started paying off bets. "Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity." TO BE CONTINUED......... SOME MONTHS LATER......... Luke was feeling rather bored. 3CPU could get to be rather irritating and RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language. Suddenly, luke felt someone's eyes boring through the back of his skull. He turned slowly to see.....nothing. A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him. "Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you." Luke froze, which was a good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't likely to be particular about direction. Luke guessed that his odds of getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good. Unfortunately, the bookie wasn't available. "Yes, very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network interface is totally undeveloped," the voice continued. A small furry creature walked out of the woods as Luke stared on. Luke's stomach had now joined the rest of his body in loud complaints. Whatever was peering at him was certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come from Alpha Centauri. "Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke. "Frobozz, y'know. morning, name's modem. what's your game? Adventure? D&D? Or are you just one of those apple-pong types that hang around the store demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes. Perhaps if he couldn't see it, it wouldn't notice him. "H'mm," muttered the creature. "Must use a different protocol. !@@@H @@ @@($5@@@H ]^"G$ @#&@@G_ (O% @@@@%%H(B ?" "No, no," stammered Luke. "I don't speak EBCDIC. I was sent here to become a Unix Wizard. must have the wrong address." "Right address," said the creature. "I am a Unix Wizard. Device drivers are a specialty. Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?" Luke eyed the creature cautiously. If this was what happened to System Wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted anything to do with it. He felt a strange affection for the familiar microcomputers of his home. And wasn't virtual memory something you got from drinking too much coke? TO BE CONTINUED.... IF WE'RE NOT LYNCHED......
(From the "Rest" of RHF)