🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DAVEG.90S...@near.cs.caltech.edu> da...@near.cs.caltech.edu (Dave Gillespie) writes:
>Okay, folks:  Have you ever had a bug in an innocent little program
>that really did delete all your files?  Reformat the hard disk?  Send
>rude mail to your mother?  (Well, probably not that.)

In a previous incarnation I programmed an Apple II (or was that ][) in
Apple Pascal. It had the annoying habit of caching the disk directory in
(obviously) unprotected memory. Hence: a crazy pointer could corrupt the
directory with no obvious symptoms until you needed to do something important
with the disk, like save your work or something. Nice... The Apple also used
the extra few bytes on the edge of the memory for the screen image for various
data items in the OS (I think the printer was one). All I remember is that
when (not if) it came time to rewrite the screen I/O routines in assembler
it wasn't too hard to really mess the machine up in non-obvious ways simply
by having an off-by-one error in a screen-address calculation.  And then
there's the "intuitive" (to a TTL hacker) way that they mapped the video
memory that made those buggy address calculation routines so complicated in
the first place...  My Atari 800 was much more pleasant to work with...