This is hilarious! History repeating itself (in internet time).
In ancient days (1975) it was rumored that typing 99999 <enter>
from a VTAM (Virtual Terminal Access Manager) connected terminal
would crash the IBM MVS mainframe OS.
Not believing that possible, Alex Morrow crashed the OS a few times
before he admitted it couldn't be just a coincidence. The insidious
part of this one was that the 5 9's were buffered, so even though
one might be showing someone an example, and typed 99999 you couldn't
back out.... The result/crash was delayed until you hit enter, but
it was bound to happen.
The "bug" was that some VTAM developer, chasing some subtle bug, put
a very hard "stop" in VTAM (core dumping the entire OS got him a lot
of trace data) that was triggered by entering 99999 - but he forgot
to remove that back door when VTAM was released. Maybe his
grandson works at MS :)
The part I find most amusing is that the crash occurs with the 5th
character entered - but maybe the blanks are required too, that
would be a slightly more unlikely entry than just 99999 ....
- joey
At 18:48 +0900 2006/05/01, June Kim wrote:
I think I have found out the cause.
When you install the Windows Office program, ctfmon.exe is
automatically installed too. ctfmon.exe might interfere with j.exe.
When I kill it from task manager manually and run j.exe, the crash
doesn't happen. Unfortunately, ctfmon.exe is automatically run again
by windows later.
On 5/1/06, bill lam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
no problem on my PC. Did you install some special program?
June Kim wrote:
Run the latest J beta and then start to type in the following:
aa=:0 0 0 0 0
At the moment that I type in the fifth zero, the system crashes.
Experimented on windows xp sp1 and with J 601k and 601m, resulting in
> the same crash.
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