At the Technion in Haifa I mentioned the Multics Cookie Monster to some CS students, they asked whether it could be done on TSO and I explained how.
There was a local tradition of celebrating April 1, so I deployed the code. Most people took it in the context of the day, but one professor was not amused. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי נֵ֣צַח יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לֹ֥א יְשַׁקֵּ֖ר ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Gabe Goldberg <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 9, 2025 1:56 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Stupid outages you caused External Message: Use Caution I've resisted chiming in with these VM stories. But resistance is futile. First one wasn't directly my fault, but I wrote the service machine that someone misused to cause an outage. Semi-early days of VM, I wrote an automatic operator -- cleverly named AUTOOP. It executed time-of-day tasks, allowed access to project media (tapes, disks) off hours, did a few other things including (via an undocumented feature) sharing what the evening's take-out food would be, fetched by the second shift operator while I watched the system console. But I digress. Another function was executing privileged system commands on behalf of designated -- but themselves non-privileged -- users. In use at a small VM-oriented software firm (VM Systems Group, not that other, much larger and similarly named place), the CEO (former data center manager where I'd developed AUTOOP) for no sensible reason sent a SHUTDOWN command to AUTOOP. Being good software, it obeyed. When the system was brought up again, the system operator's Profile Exec ran, including an AUTOLOG command to start AUTOOP. Which found, in its command queue, the processed but undeleted SHUTDOWN command. There being no way to interrupt that elegant loop, the system was cold started, losing the SHUTDOWN command, and everything else in system Spool including plenty good stuff. But it was a toy computer running in a toy company, so not much real damage. Next was my fault. From early days, VM commemorated each two user CPU seconds used with the "blip character". Initially a twitch of Selectric type ball, it later became a repeating word on 3270 screens, marching down from top. Wanting to entertain a colleague, I used privileged CP command STCP (Store into CP real memory) to change his blip character, so it would be like a Burmashave sign on his terminal. I got it wrong, severely annoying CP. When system logo appeared on my screen, I told the operator I'd fill out the outage report. Next, also mine. Very early time when VM had gone production, after a live test period, I was at home accessing the system using Silent 700 terminal. Maybe the operator annoyed me or maybe I played a joke -- I shut the system down, then remembered -- we're live with users. It was early enough with VM for us -- and evening -- so I'm not sure anyone cared. Not an outage, but a practical joke -- which surely deserves and will likely get its own thread here. Again, early in my site's VM usage, I rigged my manager's CMS Profile Exec to log her off every other time she logged on. She was a good sport so much merriment ensued as she tried to diagnose and demonstrate the problem. -- Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. [email protected] 3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433 LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
