Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!think!ames!oliveb!pyramid!voder!apple!baum
From: baum@apple.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: What the world needs now
Message-ID: <936@apple.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 5-Jun-87 13:25:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: apple.936
Posted: Fri Jun  5 13:25:29 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Jun-87 19:38:14 EDT
References: <12067@topaz.rutgers.edu> <408@rlvd.UUCP> <215@ttrde.UUCP>
Reply-To: baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum)
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 25

--------
[]
>
>What I find interesting are the stories involving strange or interesting
>quirks using computers.  Have you ever heard of the Random Glitch?  There 
>apparently was this programmer who used the network to invoke his random
>glitch, this program would roam the network reproducing itself and then 
>sleep for some random interval then come alive and send "I am the Random
>Glitch catch me if you can... HA HA HA HA", to the computer console
>and exit.  But the Random Glitch was reproduced somewhere else and would
>continue to infect the network.  They could not bring down the whole
>network to catch the little bugger so they sent out a destroyer program,
>the repentant inventor of the Random Glitch wrote it, to catch the
>Random Glitch and destroy all copies of it.  

    I believe this story is slightly apocryphal. There was a program
called the Random Glitch, or something similar. It ran on either one
of the PDP-10s at the MIT AI labs, or on the original PDP-1. All it
would do is print out its amusing message, relocate itself somewhere,
and set the timer interrupt for some random interval. I'm not sure
why this was so hard to track down, as looking at the timer interrupt
vector should have been enough

--
{decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!apple!baum		(408)973-3385