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From: peter@sugar.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: What the world needs now
Message-ID: <153@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Jun-87 09:18:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.153
Posted: Wed Jun 10 09:18:38 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Jun-87 05:40:53 EDT
References: <12067@topaz.rutgers.edu> <408@rlvd.UUCP> <215@ttrde.UUCP> <936@apple.UUCP>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 15
Summary: Random Glitch on UNIX

In article <936@apple.UUCP>, baum@apple.UUCP (Allen J. Baum) writes:
> >What I find interesting are the stories involving strange or interesting
> >quirks using computers.  Have you ever heard of the Random Glitch?  There 
> 
>     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

The Random Glitch existed at Berkeley for a while. It was started by a trojan
horse game program, changed argv[0] to something innocuous (like a.out or cat),
and went to sleep for a while. Then it would fork a new copy, print its message
on a random console, and exit. The new copy would then change its argv[0]
again and go to sleep for a while. It was pretty hard to find. A buddy of mine
wrote it -- one of those weird libertarian types. The only problem I saw was
that its parent program was a pretty awful game.