8 Feb
2020
8 Feb
'20
5:15 a.m.
On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 9:37:22 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Fri, 7 Feb 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey
wrote:
That brings back another recollection, not Unix-related.
In about 1978 I was getting fed up with the lack of clear text error
messages from Tandem's Guardian operating system. A typical message
might be
FILE SYSTEM ERROR 011
Yes, Tandem didn't use leading 0 to indicate octal. This basically
meant ENOENT, but it was all that the end user saw. By chance I had
been hacking in the binaries and found ways to catch such messages and
put them through a function which converted them into clear text
messages. For reasons that no longer make sense to me, I stored the
texts in an external file, which required a program to update it.
Early one morning I was playing around with this, and for the fun of
it I changed the text for error 11 from "File not found" to "Please
enter FUP PURGE ! *" (effectively rm -f *).
I was still giggling about this when the project manager came to me
and said "Mr. Lehey, I think I've done something silly".
Thank God for backups! We were in a big IBM shop, and the operators
religiously ran a backup every night. Nothing lost.
Greg
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But over the years I've been surprised how
many people have been fooled.
I'm sure that we've all pulled pranks like that. My favourite was piping
the output of "man" (a shell script on that system) through "Valley
Girl"
(where each "!" was followed e.g. by "Gag me with a spoon!" etc).
Well, $BOSS came into the office after a "heavy" night, and did something
like "man uucp", not quite figuring out what was wrong; I was summoned
shortly afterwards, as I was the only possible culprit...