Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!pyramid!prls!philabs!ttidca!hollombe From: hollombe@ttidca.TTI.COM (The Polymath) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Message-ID: <3939@ttidca.TTI.COM> Date: 23 Feb 89 21:41:32 GMT References: <7143@pyr.gatech.EDU> <6540007@hpcupt1.HP.COM> <2999@alliant.Alliant.COM> <3937@ttidca.TTI.COM> Reply-To: hollombe@ttidcb.tti.com (The Polymath) Organization: The Cat Factory Lines: 81 Some of my adventures in computing: I first got involved with computers on a self-taught basis at CSU, Northridge. At the time, their batch system was a CDC-3300. I was trying to teach myself FORTRAN out of the manuals they left lying around in all the terminal rooms. After fumbling around for a few hours, I got to a point where my program was trying to open a disk file for writing. It seemed to work the first time, but failed on all subsequent runs. In desperation, I finally sought out a system guru in the CS department. He took a look at my cards and turned white. "My God!", he said, "You've opened a file on the master disk! It's [the disk] 99% full!" I explained that I was just following the instructions in the manuals. He confiscated my card deck. The next day, all the relevant manuals had disappeared from the terminal rooms. Another CSUN adventure (not mine): One of the CS professors once promised an "A" in his course to anyone who successfully brought down the system (the CDC-3300). Towards the end of the semester, one student was doing poorly in all his projects and tests and decided to take a desperate stab at it. He succeeded. With one punch card. With one word on the punch card. The word was HALT. (He got his "A", too). On odd comments in source code: One of my first tasks as a professional programmer was to aid in the analysis of a Pascal compiler prior to porting it to a different CPU. An error message output after failing to parse a complex expression: Expression code too grotesque. And a comment found after a complex attempt to validate a floating point expression: { Well sh*t! After all that work! } Another program we wrote had a subroutine called KLUGE(). It was, too. Then there was the time I put a 5,000 page output limit on a batch job submittal form, but left a 1 minute max CPU time on the job control card. My program went into an infinite loop and the operator chose to honor the job control over the written form. I came in the next day to collect my output and found a four foot stack of paper waiting for me. Every page was covered with 66 repetitions of the same line. About 250,000 lines in all, I think. My boss was not amused. A certain bank, which shall remain nameless, has a subsidiary in Puerto Rico that uses their proprietary ATMs. The ATMs display instructions to the customers in both English and Spanish. Legend has it the Spanish screens used to be created by a little old lady with an English-Spanish dictionary in an obscure office in New York. At one time the standard greeting screen said, in English, "Please insert your card in the slot on your right and take it out." This was duly, and literally, translated into Spanish on the lines below. It was several months before the home office learned that the literal translation of "slot" in Spanish has a rather unfortunate slang interpretation in Puerto Rico. One of the fastest screen mods we ever got out the door ... (I like to think we gave the customers a giggle or two, but banks have little sense of humor). > The 3B2 defines a couple of magic numbers used by the firmware > to keep track of system state. defines some > of them to be: > > #define FATAL 0xFEEDBEEFL /* fatal error, reset system */ > #define VECTOR 0xA11C0DEDL /* reset goes to rst_handler */ > #define REBOOT 0x8BADF00DL /* reboot w/o diags for UN*X */ > #define REENTRY 0xADEBAC1EL /* reenter fw from a reset w/o failure mesage */ > Stephen J. Friedl 3B2-kind-of-guy friedl@vsi.com As I recall the IBM 370's used to display the hex code DEAD on the front panel after executing the equivalent of the HALT instruction. -- The Polymath (aka: Jerry Hollombe, hollombe@ttidca.tti.com) Illegitimati Nil Citicorp(+)TTI Carborundum 3100 Ocean Park Blvd. (213) 452-9191, x2483 Santa Monica, CA 90405 {csun|philabs|psivax}!ttidca!hollombe