15 Mar
2007
15 Mar
'07
5:09 p.m.
It's hex.
It's one of the "usual" hex patterns that "spell" out words
using only 0-9 and a-f. Here are a couple of others that I've seen &
used in projects: 0xdeadbeef, 0xc0edbabe. There are others, but I
don't have them off the top of my head.
Bored programmers. On the CDC STAR, we had DEAD codes for system
crashes. IIRC, DEADBEEF was the panic code for the pager faulting
for a non-resident page (The pager can't page itself, so this was a
"you can't get here from there" type of error).