In college in an OS course about 20 years ago, we tried fork-bomb on HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux and MINIX (2.0)(they have FreeBSD now). On some OSes, it created

In college in an OS course about 20 years ago, we tried fork-bomb on HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux and MINIX (2.0)(they have FreeBSD now). On some OSes, it created a boat-load of zombie processes. Another one was the malloc() bomb (sometimes combining with the fork-bomb to be the malloc-fork-bomb(). On some modern OSes, you have to actually initialize memory to something other than zeroes and keep a pointer to them to prevent aggressive compression and heap compaction. Finally, running John the Ripper when they still ran NIS and getting the passwords of 26 lecturers and professors in 30 seconds by simply taking the output from getent passwd. PS: Back in the day, before people lost their minds and over-criminalize nothingburgers, I almost got Aaron Schwartz'ed when I setup a web proxy in the computer lab to access some payware documentation off-campus that was IP locked. Thankfully, they use Postgres instead of Redwood Shores'-ware now.