[PLUG] That's It! Nautilus is HISTORY!

[Ron Braithwaite]

On Sep 6, 2005, at 7:34 PM, AthlonRob wrote:
> Perhaps we should all share our "root oops" stories or something to  
> make
> the new guy feel better?  :-)

Well, a long time ago I had just taken a job as a systems programmer  
in beautiful San Bernardino, armpit of the universe (I was living in  
Idyllwild and commuting). A large part of the job involved writing  
microcode for the Data General MV20000, which led to a number of very  
funny stories (not necessarily funny at the time, though). I won't go  
into the reasons why you had to use microcode to get any significant  
systems level work done, but suffice it to say that the MV series had  
4 special purpose 32 bit registers available to the compilers and  
macro assembler, while there were 16 general purpose 32 bit registers  
if you used microcode.

At any rate, I was writing a test suite to bang on the MUMPS compiler/ 
interpreter that I was working on and I was told by my manager not to  
mess with the development machine, since they were doing something  
there as well. So I log into the production machine to run my  
innocuous little test.

Except it wasn't that innocuous.

When the test routine to check the date function, which had to  
support both Gregorian and Julian dates, I just slammed the hardware  
timedate back to a couple thousand years ago and marched it forward.

Very shortly afterwards, there was a mob outside my office door with  
pitchforks and torches and tar and feathers. Seriously, there were  
probably over 20 people in the hall yelling for my head on a platter.

It seems that we had essentially replace MV/OS with our own  
customized MUMPS operating system (very funny stories around MUMPS,  
believe you me), which used the timedate function to stamp the  
virtual memory pages. When I whacked back timedate a couple thousand  
years, there were about 60 people trying to actually do real work on  
the machine. Many of them had not saved their work for *days* and it  
was all gone.

I no longer do any work on production machines, even if management  
tells me to. I can laugh at it now, but there were several people in  
danger of aneurisms and I think I suffered some hearing loss that day.

Peace,
-Ron

Ron Braithwaite
2015 NE 37th Ave
Portland, OR 97212 USA
503-267-3250
ron at braithwaites.net