[expert] that's not a bug; that's a feature

[Charles Curley]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 10:12:24AM -0600, Bug Hunter wrote:
-> 
->   Trivia:
-> 
->   The early Motorola 6800 MicroProcessor had undefined instructions that
-> you could feed to it -- instructions being binary numbers, after all.  One
-> of those instructions would put the micro in an illegal state.  It would
-> halt, and after 10 - 15 minutes, if left on in that state without a reset,
-> it would burn up.  No flames.  Maybe some smoke.

Sometime a cute little crater in the plastic packages.

-> 
->   the instruction was nicknamed by our guys, "HCF."  Halt and Catch Fire.

Actually, that was put in at the request of the DoD as a security
feature. It was later taken out because some bugs in the ADA compiler
caused it to execute whenever anyone over the rank of Major logged in.



-- 

                -- C^2

No windows were crashed in the making of this email.

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