🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1199@swbatl.UUCP> george@swbatl.UUCP (George Nincehelser 5-6544) writes:
>20 or so copies on the system (that I knew of) and apparently
>too many of us were running them at the same time.  Sure tied up
...
>The system administrator and our teachers were none too happy.  They
>went into our accounts and searched for all traces of the program
>and eliminated them (what a bunch of squares!).  They didn't find
>my copy, though...I renamed it to the name of one of my assignments!

Ahh, memories.  Waaay back, like in 82, I was a Labbie for the
last "computer archticture" class at Rice to use PDP11s.  It
was a disaster of a class, since the only things you could do
in assembly language on the machine were the same old DP-inspired
introductory programming assignmnents, except you had to torture
them into assembly language.  The next year they got nifty little
single board computers with elevator simulators and assorted
implements of destruction ...

Anyway, picture if you will...  A PDP-11/45 with, oh maybe 1/4 Meg
and 12 terminals running a seriously hacked V7 kernel.  (Hi JD).
How hacked?  So hacked ... that the home-brew multiwindow editor
it ran spent most of its time inside the kernel, in a really
large piece of code that had been hacked out of the editor and
bludgeoned into looking like a line discipline.

Now imagine people logged into all of these terminals.. Say, 4
running the full-screen editor, 4 running the assembler/linker,
and 3 running an infinite loop.  And the Labbie, playing rogue.

It didn't take long for there to be several copies of rogue, and
a good thing it was, too, since the powers-that-were caught on
relatively quickly.  Fortunately, their first attempt at
erradicating the game was not thorough enough, and we were
ready for them the next time.

First they scanned for files name rogue -- we renamed them.
Then they scanned for files the same size as rogue -- we split them.
Then they scanned for the strings in rogue -- we encrypted them...

The startup script took longer and longer to run ... :-)

Sigh -- If they had been more careful the first time I'd
probably have a degree now.


Another story from the same time, a different machine -- The
official computer center was running MVS as its student
programming environment because they hadn't figured out how
to pinch the pennies in VM yet.  This means cards, with all
the associated horror, which I would have thought hillarious
in 1981-82 if I hadn't had to use it.  Anyway, JCL isn't
an accademically interesting language so it isn't taught,
most people just used canned control cards.  Along comes
the first Pascal lab of the new semester, and the handout
has the canned JCL on it...

Except it wasn't completely canned.  The prof had thoughtfully
left a variable in it.  //jobname job whatever,time=(0,sec),
or something like that.  No, "jobname" wasn't the variable --
as far as I know every job ever submitted for that class
was named "jobname" -- I'm talking about "sec".  It was supposed
to be replaced by a number, like say 15.  A number less
than 60.  A number, in any case, with less than 3 digits....

Now "sec", while not a number, also has more than two characters
in it....  And of course some bright spark had saved the world
the price of a bowl of rice by cleverly stuffing the characters
from that parsing step in between two critical system variables.
I never learned what exactly was getting squashed, but it was
memorable...

If you've never done it, there is something viscerally gratifying
about watching a card reader digest your deck.  You get used to the
rhythm, it comforts you to hear and see that all is well with
your job...   So it was a real attention getter when somebody
put a deck with the canned job card in it in the reader and
punched start.  whrrrr chk chk chk -----------silence-------

Millions of dollars worth of equipment brought to its knees by
a 0.03 cent piece of paper.  Had to be cold booted every time,
and it happened a lot.  Next day there was a rather stern announcement
in class...


Speaking of viscerally gratifying things in computing ... watching
a DOS user trying to cope with the asyncronous activity of a
Unix disk is more fun than pulling the legs off chips.  They
really get the disk activity patterns wired into their skulls.

Oh well, time to get some sleep.  g'night.
-- 
Steve Nuchia	      South Coast Computing Services      (713) 964-2462
"You have no scars on your face, and you cannot handle pressure." - Billy Joel