Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!hplabs!hpfcdc!hpldola!ritchie
From: ritchie@hpldola.HP.COM (Dave Ritchie)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <11060013@hpldola.HP.COM>
Date: 10 Feb 89 23:15:45 GMT
References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU>
Organization: HP Elec. Design Div. -ColoSpgs
Lines: 19

>hpldola:comp.misc bga@raspail.UUCP (Bruce Albrecht) / 11:43 am  Feb  8, 1989 /
>When Grinnell College upgraded from a PDP 11/45 to an 11/70, the DEC field
>engineer finished the installation and booted the 11/70.  It started up, and
>15 seconds later, it promptly died.  He tried it again, and it failed again.
>He called up his superior, who thought about it for a few moments, asked him
>if he had removed the loopback plugs on all the serial interface boards.  It
>seems that RSTS/E sends out a message informing the users that the system is
>on its way up, and when the message was sent, the loopback plug turned it
>into a user input, to which the system sent a message 'input ignored.', 
>which also became user input ..., and the system died because it ran out of
>free buffers.
>----------

  You could do this with RSX-11 by holding down a function key on a 9600
baud VT100. RSX would allocate a 80 byte buffer whenever a ESC character was
received. Eventually, free pool memory would be exhausted and the system would
crash. (We fixed it so that the offending terminal was ignored and all the 
allocated pool packets were freed, after which we would restart the OS.)
					Dave