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Snowite/1000 and the 7 Disks |
Every day the vain Queen queried her database:
"Database, Database,
on my drive,
who's the most beautiful system alive ?"
Being well structured, the database could not help but give the truth -
"Well, you were once the hottest item on the market, my Queen, but the
Snowite/1000 is the up-and-coming thing now."The Queen ][ became irate. She ordered every system that wasn't 100% compatible with her to be cast out of the business market. The poor Snowite/1000 was left to forage in the woods of the educational and home use market. Soon she came to a little shop whose occupants were not home. She decided to rest there and charge up her battery pack. Around 5:30, after all the businesses shut down, Snowite heard the sound of singing coming towards the shop. She ran to the window, looked out, and saw seven little disks coming towards her singing:
"I/O I/O
To store the bytes we go
As disks and drives
We spend our lives
I/O I/O"
The seven disks came into the shop and were surprised to meet the
Snowite/1000. They immediately fell in love with her perfect, uncorrupted
FAT and agreed to let her stay there until she found her niche in the
market. The disks introduced themselves to her. Their names were Floppy,
SCSI, DASD, DS/DD, Magneto-Opti, Flakey, and C:. Snowite enjoyed her stay
with the disks and while they went off to store bytes every day, she stayed
home and computed many interesting things and contemplated her niche in the
market.Meanwhile, back in the business world, the Queen ][ was enjoying her new-found popularity among users since she had driven the Snowite/1000 out of the market. She went to the database and queried:
"Database, Database,
on my drive,
who's the most beautiful system alive ?"
The database gave the reply - "Well, Queen, you seem to be popular in the
business market, but the Snowite/1000's growing popularity in the home and
educational markets is beginning to draw a large portion from your market
share."The Queen ][ was outraged. She deleted the database and then contemplated how she would put an end to the Snowite/1000. She decided that she would plant a virus in the young system and corrupt the beautiful File Allocation Table. Disguised as a software salesman, the Queen went to visit the home of the seven disks.
<ding dong>
"Yes, what do you want ?" asked the beautiful Snowite.
"I bring you a wonderful new program that can improve your firmware and make your FAT even better than it is!"
"No thank you, I don't use software to improve my FAT, it is written into my operating system."
"But dearie, I just downloaded this off of a very popular BBS. It is supposedly all the rage!"
"Oh! In that case, I'll try it!"
The Snowite/1000 eagerly ran the new program and soon her FAT had been corrupted. The evil Queen rebooted the Snowite/1000. Since her FAT was corrupted, the Snowite/1000 was unable to reboot and the evil Queen went home to enjoy a comfortable market position.
When the seven disks returned home that evening they were dismayed to find that their Snowite/1000 system wasn't working. They tried several times to reset her and even tried unplugging her for a couple of minutes, but to no avail. C: asked "Well, did anybody take a backup of her ?" and they replied various common replies such as "Well, no, I didn't have time," "I didn't think I needed to, she was running so well," "It takes up too many disks," and the famous "I didn't know how." So the disks had no choice but to let the word leak out that they had a Snowite/1000 that wasn't working.
Several days later, a handsome Prince/Analyst came strolling through the woods. He had heard that some little disks had a Snowite/1000 - his dream system. When he spied Snowite he knew immediately what her trouble was. He took her disk, hooked it into his own disk controller and carefully rebuilt her FAT until she ran even better than she ever did. Under the guidance of the handsome Prince/Analyst, the Snowite grabbed an overwhelming share of the market, knocking the Queen ][ into oblivion and successfully sired several laptops before retiring to the loving care of the Prince/Analyst where they computed happily ever after.