Eric Raymond observes that you can tell a lot about a culture by the holidays it observes, and hackerdom (in the classic sense) observes April 1...
On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 9:14 AM Seymour J Metz <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > -- Jay Maynard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
