Computers, viruses, reboots and Rome

In Rome's Revolution, after Rome takes Rei up for his first training mission, she returns the tug to Dara in preparation for landing. However, in what later turns out to be yet another attempt on Rei's life, the nav-computer malfunctions and instead of slowing down, it speeds up heading right for the moon. Certain death was looming.

I work in the computer industry and I cannot tell you how much of my life I waste cleaning out computers from malware, viruses, trojans, rootkit incursions and more. I don't know who these people are that write computer viruses and while I am mostly against the death penalty, I heartily endorse it for these people. And a slower, more painful death it should be.

I digress. Because of my experiences with computers, or rather with people calling me for help because something is not working or the computer is locked up, the first thing I always tell them is to reboot. This fixes 90% of the problems.

This measure is not just limited to my Windows PC, I have had to reboot my iPad and my Mac and even power-cycle my Samsung Convoy II dumb-phone.



So, too, it was with this scene where Rei and Rome were going to die due to a malfunctioning nav-computer. We discovered later that Estar had planted a small virus causing the computer to lock up. My solution for Rome was to have her simply reboot the nav-computer. However, they were going to crash long before Rome could disconnect and reconnect the machine.

Rei's out-of-the-Vuduri-box thinking saved the day. While a well-formed PPT tunnel requires a complete stop relative to the nearest gravitational well, that doesn't mean you can't form a little one even with substantial velocity. In this particular case, the tunnel only traversed a distance of five or ten thousand miles but it was enough to go past Dara thus giving them the time they needed to reboot the nav-computer and return safely to the moon.

Yesterday, I discoursed about the 6502 microprocessor and told you it was relevant to today’s post. Well here’s why. When Rome asked OMCOM to reboot the nav-computer, OMCOM could not and his answer was:

“I cannot contact the nav-computer. It is locked into a tight loop. I triggered the non-maskable interrupt but its execution cycling will not stop. You will need to shut it down and restart it for me to reestablish communications.”

The non-maskable interrupt or NMI was one of the most useful pins on the 6502 chip. Not matter what it was doing, if you tripped that pin, the microprocessor would stop what it was doing and jump to the location stored in a special set of registers. In other words, if the computer was locked up, it would always let you reboot. If it didn’t listen to the NMI, you were screwed. Obscure? Sure. But I wanted to say thank you to the 6502, my favorite chip ever, in one of my books as sign of love.