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Astolaf.133 net.misc utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf!hastings Mon Feb 15 23:54:45 1982 DEC WARS Have you ever wondered what happened to all those characters eaten by arpavax? Well, we found most of them loitering around on our system, taking up disk space. So we're putting them back out on the net where they belong. Any resemblence to events real or imagined is purely intentional.

A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax).....

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>From the Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker episode n

Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.

"It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual) trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in 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. "Let's 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?"

"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!"

"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... ---------------------- * DEC, PDP, VAX, and UNIBUS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation.

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