Unix Wars!!!

Meanwhile, the two droids' tiny process dove headlong towards the only nearby disk. "Are you \fIsure\fR you can ptrace this thing without aborting it?" queried 3CPU. "Its relocation bits were almost all stripped during the attack, and I never was any good at patching binaries..."
  As RS232 was about to reply their process reached its endpoint and terminated abruptly, dumping them in the midst of a large unallocated region on the unknown volume.
  Many random seeks later they trudged up to the looming wreckage of a deallocated i-node.
  "Shelter!" croaked 3CPU, but RS232 had barely begun to emit a NACK when a horde of dwarfish code fragments swarmed out of it to overwhelm them. They had been captured by Glitchas.

  Enter Luke Vaxhacker, bartering with the Glitchas for replacement parts for his uncle. They tried to sell him 3CPU, but the 'droid didn't know protocol for an 11/40 under RSTS, so Luke would need ome kind of conversion hardware.
  "How about this little RS232 unit?" said 3CPU "I've interfaced with him many times before and he's excellent at keeping his bits straight."
  Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice. The Glitchas wanted to barter some more, but the three left before getting swapped out.
  RS232, however, wasn't the type to stay put without retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the empty disk space.
  "Oh, great!" said Luke "He'll probably map himself into a bad block somewhere. I guess we'd better go after him."
  Hours later the two traced him to the home of old PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily running a diagnostic on the little RS unit.   "Is this droid yours? His status registers are stuttering and
someone's done some \fIodd\fR things to his interrupt lines. Leaving something like this on-line is just asking for downtime -- but I think I may have him fixed for now."

  Later that evening, during a futile attempt to interface RS232 to
Kenobi's Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small
droid's CXR lead with his Initiate Remote Test. A projector crackled to life, casting a hologram of a young lady with her hair done up like twin Danish pastries imploring help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.

  "Darn," mumbled Luke "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out."   "Why, that's the Princess!" 3CPU said. Luke peered at the image critically.
  "No, that's a modified Steinburg dither with anti-aliasing. Nice
sculpted surfaces..." Kenobi interrupted Luke with a frown.
  "Luke, this message changes things. Listen..."
  Kenobi seemed to think there was a possible threat to Luke's $HOME. If the Admin troops were indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they would more than just charge for cpu time.
  They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a relative path) only to
find a vacant directory.

  "Take your father's bytesaber, Luke." Kenobi said. "You will need to learn the ways of the Source now."
  "The ... Source?" Luke queried, wide-eyed.
  "The Source -- the cosmic template of the System, within which all knowledge and power can be had. But you must always beware of the Dark Side..."

More Unix Wars --->>

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