Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!microsoft!philba
From: philba@microsoft.UUCP (Phil Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Looking for computer folklore
Message-ID: <747@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 89 21:59:31 GMT
References: <8902210810.AA26436@MATH.Tau.Ac.IL>
Reply-To: philba@microsoft.UUCP (Phil Barrett)
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 24


When I was a grad student in CS, the school had a systems lab and
had hired a senior in HS to do systems grunt work.  One of his assignments
was to run backups on our `massive' PDP-11/40 everyday at noon.  He was 
quite taken with himself and was pretty pushy about kicking people off
the system.  His login Id on the system (V6, no less) was `oracle' and
he certainly behaved as if it was appropriate.  One day, my partner and
I had finished a project and were printing out required documentation to
hand in that afternoon.  The printer had been really flakey and getting
a complete printout was a b*tch.  Of course, noon rolls around and sure
enough, in comes Oracle to do the daily dump.  No begging, pleading or
cajoling on my part detered him from swift execution of his appointed duty
at noon sharp and we had about 10 minutes of printing left.  Meanwhile,
my partner was typing a little script that printed

	Panic: invalid space on dev rp01  (or some such device)

in an endless loop on the system console (an honest to god for real
TTY - ASR33).  The Systems Programmer took a look at it and said something like
`I've never seen that in the code -- where's it coming from'.  Oracle starts
arguing about how `he had seen it and the best thing to do is let it run its
course before taking the system down'.  Gee, what a great idea.  Our print
out finished, we killed off the script and sauntered off to class laughing the
entire way.