blinkenlight blundering / was TI-990 in Muncie

William Maddox wrote: The sight of that front panel brings back a memory: 1980: As an undergrad I was invited to work on an OS development project (Verex: successor of Thoth, predecessor of VKernel). The prof (Dave Cheriton) took me to the machine/terminal room to show me the system. We went by the half-dozen ASCII terminals occupied by a few grad students programming away and he indicated these were the terminals connected to the system we were working on (by this time it was already a functioning, usable OS). We walked past some other equipment sharing the lab, to the TI-990 mini running the system, and stood by it's chest-height front panel containing numerous push-buttons and blinking LEDS. Dave explained some things to me about the machine and said the front panel buttons were not active when the system was running and he reached up and pushed one of the buttons. So I reached up and pushed a button as well. (Who amongst us can resist an opportunity to push a button?) I still remember the stunned slow-motion "not.. that .. button..!" from Dave, followed by cries from the other side of the room - the students at the terminals - "hey, what happened!?" ... "the system's crashed!" Out of the 2 dozen push-buttons on the front panel, I had randomly elected to push the ONE button that was NOT disabled. If you looked closely you could see it was the one labeled "HALT". Well, it looked just like all the other buttons. - - - Two or so years later one of those students at the terminals (Steve D.) who had lost an editing session to my blundering would unwittingly exact revenge upon me: I was working one evening, just about finished after a long solid day of writing code. The new source had been compiled and was functioning, everything was great. I started to clean up the source-code file directory I was working in (BSD Unix by this time). I was about to execute "rm *.old". type "r" type "m" type space type "*" the phone rings I pick up the phone - it's Steve (recently departed to grad school at Stanford) calling long-distance from California and he needs someone to look up some info in a file he left on the system (no telnet access at the time). Cognizant of the long-distance charges he would be incurring, I hasten to access the file for him, press <RETURN> to get to a fresh command line, and promptly destroy my entire day's work of tedious, abstruse, code production.