4 ms·
> 35-year-old bug Long ago, someone was archiving magnetic tapes at MIT, containing Lisp Machine backups, from longer ago. Or maybe they were TOPS-20 backups.
by mncharity 6y ago
> 35-year-old bug
Long ago, someone was archiving magnetic tapes at MIT, containing Lisp Machine backups, from longer ago. Or maybe they were TOPS-20 backups... my memory has faded.
Archiving here means using an old 9-track tape machine with a custom driver, to copy data off now read-once 9 and 7 track tapes. Read-once tapes, because after the tape goes by the read head, the tape's plastic backing goes one way, and the tape's rust goes another. The backing is rewound, and the rust makes a scattered little pile. The original driver would backup and retry on error. Scrubbing back and forth, back and forth. Which here, would be bad. But back to our story.
On one such longer-ago backup, was a core dump file. A core dump, with a snapshot of the frame buffer. A frame buffer showing someone's screen, at that moment of the core dump, so long ago. And at that moment, that someone was being pranked. Pranked by a program which would draw, crawling across the screen, a little spider. A little bitmap sprite bug. A bug, trapped by chance in a core dump, and preserved in rust.
- anonymousisme 6y agoNever saw the spider, but I do remember "xroach", in which roaches would scatter from underneath where a window was after being closed. Great fun from about 25-30 years ago. EDIT: It looks like xroach still lives! https://www.freshports.org/games/xroach/ https://www.freshports.org/games/xroach/
- mncharity 6y ago> xroach still lives! Ha. I've an old AR head-pans-around-desktop hack. Xroach in AR might make fun video...
- Shared404 6y agoUsually when I hear "might make fun video..." I'm intrigued. I'll pass on this though.
- bitwize 6y agoA bitmap spider figures into a display-hack demo in Open Genera that I could never get working. I think it may be more related to that.
- mncharity 6y agoThat sounds right - tnx!
- tingletech 6y agoFragile e-amber
- codezero 6y agoThere's a whole paper about crabs, it's surfaced up here on HN before and it's fantastic. Let me know if this is the same thing you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22383205
- mncharity 6y agoMy fuzzy memory is of a solitary bug. But my memory hook is "bug in amber", which could have pulled askew cardinality and subphylum. A program like crabs could be seriously disturbing in VR and AR. A transparently declarative framework like A-Frame might permit 3rd-party object eating. Or more difficult, there's various "visible body" code... imagine watching your arms eaten down to muscle and bone. Or to gears, depending on avatar. Or the people you're chatting with. Eeep.
- totetsu 6y agoWere these tapes designed to be read once(if so why), or were they degraded with time?