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From: morris@jade.jpl.nasa.gov (Mike Morris)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Summary: Several items...  (the good old days (? !))
Message-ID: <864@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
Date: 28 Feb 89 06:29:18 GMT
Sender: news@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov
Reply-To: morris@jade.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Mike Morris)
Organization: What - me organized?
Lines: 48

Years ago, I did some Data General consulting out of my/my parents house.
Some memories:  There was a rev of AOS (3.something, I believe) that could
be crashed easily - just have several users hold down the tab & repeat keys.
Something about the system expanding the tabs to 8 spaces, which filled up
and overflowed the ring buffers and clobbered OS code.  Instant system panic.
Or the 12.5 mb (14" platter!) winchester disk that could become a 25mb by
moving a jumper and reformatting it. 
Or the old Nova 800/1200 4k core (!) memories that could be burnt up
if you stored a 0 at address 0 and then jumped to that location (octal 0=JMP 0).
Or the story that the Nova 1200 (with a 1200ns clock time) was "invented"
to use up the warehouse(s) full of core stacks that were just a little too
slow for the Nova 800...
Or the fact that changing 5 microcode ROMs would change a Nova 4 into a 
Eclipse S-140...
Or you could suck out the solder and pour in the chips and convert a 128k
16-bit Nova memory board into a 256k Eclipse 21-bit error-correcting memory
board...

Back in school we had a Burroughs 3500 (Pasadena City College).  I was 
doing some "lets see what happens" programming (in Fortran) and the
instructor politely asked that I let him look at my stuff before I submitted
it (overnight batch).  You see, there was this bug that another student 
found: You define a gigantic block common (3-d complex matrices will do it...)
and then zero it.  The system overflows memory to disk (Burroughs had virtual
memory loooong before IBM) and there was this bug in the max size of the 
virtual file check routine....  Before this earlier student's bug was caught
they staff had to do a half a dozen system reloads/regens - from a dozen
boxes of binary punch cards!  His memory array was larger than _all_ of the
disk the system had on it, and he had zeroed all of it...

A story that a friend tells is where a classmate figured out how to set
the schools IBM 1620 system memory to all parity checks...  The system was
called the CADET, which stood for "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try - the machine
did all it's math by table lookup (yes, that was one machine that could tell
you that 2+2=5 with a straight face - just diddle a few bits in memory).

Or the rev 1.0 of a OS that deleted the file, but forgot to mark the space
as free...  It didn't take long for a 10mb disk to shrink to < 1mb...

BTW - the Nova 4 in my dining room is for sale.  128k, 16-slot chassis, 
and several peripherals, including a DECwriter III as the system printer.
Boots RDOS, multi-user basic.  Wichester disk, 8" floppy, 2400' mag tape,
dual consoles, extras.  Make offer.

US Snail:  Mike Morris                    UUCP: Morris@Jade.JPL.NASA.gov 
           P.O. Box 1130                  Also: WA6ILQ
           Arcadia, Ca. 91006-1130
#Include disclaimer.standard     | The opinions above probably do not even