🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3...@bbx.basis.com> ru...@bbx.basis.com (Russ Kepler) writes:
>
>I heard it was a favorite trick of remote sites to display messages
>about the supposed parentage of the on-duty operator; at least until a
>passing VIP noticed the message slowly scrolling to the left...
>
>Ah, well, not as bad as sending a "mount tape" message with a push
>just after the operator left for the weekend.
>
If your into nasties:

The original Dartmouth Time Sharing system used a GE Datanet 30 as
control machine and a GE-235 to do the actual work.  The D-30 could
store into 235 memory, but the 235 was 20 bits + parity and the D-30
was 18 bits no parity, so the D-30 programmer had to be careful to set
the two high order bits AND the parity bit correctly.

Occassionally a faculty member or some such would want to do something
more complicated than you could manage in a 100 line basic program so
we would have to take the time sharing system down while they ran
their giant (1000 line) Fortran programs.  So the D-30 wouldn't get
bored, somebody also wrote a program for it which flashed its
multitued of lights in pretty patterns while it was idle.

But then somebody hacked it some more so that after awhile it would
store a word with bad parity in location 0 of the 235.  The 235 was a
VERY synchronous machine and did a fetch of lcoation 0 on any cycle
when it wasn't fetching something else (which was alot of the time).
It also stopped dead on parity errors.

The flashing lights program also got a name change to "5 Minutes to
Live".
(Sarr Blumson)