By the way, it just dawned on me that preventing the division by 0 is not even solving the problem. What then, just set the delay to the biggest representable d

By the way, it just dawned on me that preventing the division by 0 is not even solving the problem. What then, just set the delay to the biggest representable delay? But on a machine with a 1000x faster CPU, that can still be off by an order of magnitude or two. And depending on what the delay is used for, that could then cause much harder to debug problems later on. Some assumptions about reasonable ranges had to be made, just like the assumption that 32 bit was a reasonable address size back then. But a more obvious error message would have been nice (something the article mentions as well).