"Rick Bensene" <rickb at bensene.com> wrote:
We had quite a bit of fun writing little programs which
would wait
for a
specific time (during other people's classes), and
then "crash" the
system at that time. Eventually, we got caught.
This reminds me of an interesting phenomenon we discovered in 1974...
the high school had an ASR-33 connected via a leased data line
(telephone with acoustic coupler) to a PDP-8/E running TSS/8 at Clemson
University, 60 miles away.
I can't remember exactly what the code was any more, but it was a very
simple patch -we would deposit a mere three words at location 307
(octal) and execute it (ST 307), and the terminal would log on another
job. So you'd have two accounts open simultaneously on the same TTY!
And if you logged off one account the other would still be open so you
couldn't log off both... they'd have to reboot the system to kill it.
Any TSS/8 gurus know how we might have done this?
We also "inadvertently" deleted the contents of one of the library
DECtapes once... there was a "ZAP" command that zeroed out the tape, so
naturally we would type in "R ZAP" frequently, and get the expected
"WRITE LOCKED" error. One day, though, it actually did it =:^0 Guess
the operator forgot to flip the write lock switch!
-Charles