Re: [TUHS] Early non-Unix filesystems?

Actually, a Magic Marker drawing a diagonal stripe down the top of the cards worked almost as well, and didn't require repunching the deck with every change... Hmm. I recall walking into the computing center to see an amazing cascade of cards arcing 20 feet across the room. The operator hadn't set up the card reader correctly.... Panic ensued... In another case, I had written a FORTRAN program that produced a page header on the printer with a page number. The first time I tried to print 200 pages, when I hit 100 the printer decided that I wanted one line per page! The printer was not a happy camper. Neither were the operators. But the closest I came to being murdered was when I submitted a job before lunch, and the sign said the turnaround time was an hour. When I got back, the job was not done, and the wait was 2 hours. Each hour, the wait grew by an hour. At about 4:30, four extremely angry operators and managers came into my office with murder in their eyes and accused me of trying to "be funny" (sic) with the computer. I had no idea what they were talking about. It turns out that the operating system had been upgraded, so that it automatically started pending jobs when it came up after a crash. It also turned out that I had made a common FORTRAN error--I had "called" a labeled common region instead of a similarly-named function. And it turned out that the first data value was a -.25 floating-point value. And it also turned out that the computer's idea of instruction decode was to pick up the first few bits of the word and use it as an index into the microcode. And it also turned out that when -.25 was so "executed", it took the CPU into the power down sequence, and it turned the machine off! And, thanks to the software upgrade, when they rebooted, it turned itself off again. And again... I was happy to escape with my skin... Steve Steve