Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [20]
‘Mr Peters, I presume,’ he said.
I hauled myself to my feet with some dignity still intact.
‘Guilty as charged.’
I’d had a mental picture of a cross between an Oxford professor and Sherlock Holmes, delicately sipping tea while he lounged in a tweed jacket. This guy looked more like a boxer or a film noir gangster in his tailored black snit. How the hell had he got into the room without making any noise? He wore a rainbow-coloured tie printed with dozens of little cats, interlocked like figures in an Escher picture.
The Doctor bent slightly so our eyes were almost level.
‘Now, Mr Peters,’ he said, looking down his long nose at me.
‘It was your decision to involve yourself in our doings, rather than the other way around. I would rather not have my concentration disturbed by a scribbler asking a lot of questions.’ He spoke in a crisp English accent, with relish, as though just pronouncing words was a pleasure in itself.
‘I think I’ve got enough computer know-how under my belt to follow what you’re doing.’
He gave me a curt nod and sat down at the writing desk.
‘Observe.’ With a flourish, the Doctor typed ‘Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge my Vow’. The letters popped up on the screen, white on black. When I didn’t seem impressed, he explained,
‘You oughtn’t to be able to do that. Strictly upper-case only on this model.’ He flipped open the lid of the machine. ‘But with a few jumper wires here, run to the 80-column card there, a replacement ROM chip courtesy of my friends at the Apple Pi users group... hey presto, eighty columns of mixed case!’
‘So,’ I said. ‘Now it can do everything my typewriter can.’
‘Unlike your typewriter, Mr Peters,’ said the Doctor dryly,
‘this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Just look at this: 64K total address space for the processor chip. A mere scrap by the standards of those new-fangled IBM machines. How could this overmatched museum piece ever hope to compete?
‘But the makers knew. They set aside a few locations in the address space, and constructed it so that accessing those memory locations directly affected the hardware. Read from this address here and – zap! – you swap your ROM space for an extra 12K of RAM. Read from this one over here, and –
zap! – swap in a different 4K block. Read here, and – zap! –
you’ve swapped in another bank and turned your 40-column display into an 80-column one. And fiddle with these locations, and you swap the whole blessed memory space, all those banks and sub-banks, and double your available RAM.
One hundred twenty-eight kilobytes of memory for the taking.’
OK, this I was familiar with: the hacker’s love songs for their machines. ‘It sounds like a lot of trouble to go to.’
‘Oh, it’s hideously overcomplicated, compared to getting a 16-bit processor and just having vast acres of memory there at your command. But that’s what makes it such a triumph.
Anyone can do incredible things if they’ve got incredible resources. It takes an artist to make poetry out of bits of string and paper clips. Now; if only this heap of junk could connect at faster than 1200 baud.’
‘While we’re waiting for it, can I ask you a few questions?’
‘You can ask,’ pronounced the Doctor, without taking his eyes off the screen. I hesitated. ‘That’s a little joke.’
‘How long have you known Miss Smith?’
‘Peri and I stumbled into one another’s company some time ago,’ he said absently. ‘Some months, at a guess. Though at times it definitely seems longer.’
The Doctor spread his hands on the beige plastic that flanked the keyboard, as though gathering his thoughts. Then he typed a short, sharp series of commands into the Apple, sat back, and hit ‘return’.
I heard the modem swing into action. But instead of connecting to another machine, it hung up after maybe six rings, and immediately started dialling again. ‘So exactly what are we up to here, Doc?’ I said.
‘What I am attempting to do, he said, ‘is to dial into the mainframe