3 ms·

I'm really curious - why 200 machines needed rebooting - how this program achieved that without any form of networking -- Also, the closest other thing I'm

I'm really curious - why 200 machines needed rebooting - how this program achieved that without any form of networking -- Also, the closest other thing I'm aware of with a similar size-to-profit ratio is K: > Perhaps conscious that with the occasional wrong result from an expression, the interpreter could be mistaken for a post-doctoral project, Whitney commented brightly, “Well, we sold ten million dollars of K3 and a hundred million of K4, so I guess we’ll sell a billion dollars worth of this.” > Someone asked about the code base. “Currently it’s 247 lines of C.” Some expressions of incredulity. Whitney displayed the source, divided between five text files so each would fit entirely on his monitor. “Hate scrolling,” he mumbled. - http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320* http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320*

mmjaa 8y ago
The machines needed rebooting because of bugs further upstream in the stack - these were the bad ol' days of DOS, and each system was really being used as a client to the database backend. For whatever reason, the sysadmins decided to reboot them daily as part of their shutdown procedure - if I recall, it was because of a bug in one of the myriad TSR's that were loaded to make the systems work properly on the network, something to do with not getting accurate clock settings from the network - and indeed, they were all networked over 10Base2 .. so maybe that was it. It was a really fun and easy hack to make. ;)