10 May
2024
10 May
'24
11:37 p.m.
On Fri, 10 May 2024, Charles via cctalk wrote:
Regarding protections, it didn't have many. I
remember spending a day
tracking down a fatal bug with a logic analyzer (emulators were still a dream
in this small company)... another programmer had used an array subscript out
of range and the compiler didn't catch it for some reason. So in this array
defined [0..20], when the typo caused a write to FOO[60] instead of FOO[20],
bad things happened.
Ah, the good old days ;)
At Goddard Space Flight Center, my position was negligible (gopher and APL
and FORTRAN programming for a British pysicist studying the Van Allen
belts).
I was told that some of the many locally applied patches were done by
writes to array elements with negative subscripts.
We may have been the first one to get some IBM 360 operating systems. I
remember one time, shortly after "upgrading", we rolled back to the
previous one, until the next one arrived.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com