5 ms·

I may be misinterpreting the story, but did Gates basically sabotage the computer (temporarily) of a trade show attendee?

duxup 5y ago
I think he just wanted to trigger an easter egg.
adenozine 5y ago
No, he was expecting the behavior of an Easter egg, which had been removed in a debug sweep because it could collide with typical usage of a command in BASIC. So, his command should've done a neat trick, and it didn't, and he was furious.
geocrasher 5y ago
Bill Gates was trying to show off an Easter Egg (hidden silly feature) that he himself had planted in DOS. Unbeknownst to him, it had been removed. Instead of printing "MICROSOFT" 10 times, it hung the machine.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  it was BASIC, not DOS. I think this was a Commodore computer he was talking about.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    Funny thing is I know it's BASIC and not DOS but I still wrote DOS. I blame lack of sleep, caffeine, and... something. But yeah my mistake there.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
consultutah 5y ago
Sort of, but on accident. He expected the command he entered to trigger the Easter egg and print Microsoft 10 times, but on the PET, they had removed the Easter egg.
barbecue_sauce 5y ago
I presume his intention was to show off the Microsoft easter egg, but because it had been removed, it did not have the expected results. I don't think there was any intention to have a detrimental effect on the machine.
- kragen 5y ago
  Also hanging a computer is not sabotage unless it's doing something like moving a robot arm at the time. You just have to reboot it. For the PET this takes under a second.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/candea/candea.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/...
    - kragen 5y ago
      Yes, automatically restarting a subsystem can be much faster than a second, but you can't type a new BASIC command much faster than that anyway.
      - sitkack 5y ago
        So the basic interpreter could wake up, run, persist it state back to flash and shut the machine down between every keypress. That microreboot paper is in my top-k list. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18263420374964189912&as_sdt=5,48&sciodt=0,48&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1826342037496418991...
        kragen 5y ago
        Yup, although not on the PET, which didn't have Flash. On a modern computer you might be interested in minimizing power consumption, and probably on-chip SRAM is a cheaper place to persist the between-keystrokes state than Flash, which is usually ruinously power-hungry NOR. You can keep CMOS SRAM alive on microwatts from a coin-cell battery for many years, as you probably know. Or were you thinking about persisting consistent state for failure recovery after a power failure? What's your top-k list? Armando Fox's crash-only software paper is also very inspiring.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago
I think its fair to say computers this simple couldn't really be sabotaged. You'd just power cycle them and they'd be back to the basic prompt (I dunno if this computer needed basic run from disk or it booted into it like a TRS-80). This is just like writing 10 Print "Microsoft!" and 20 Goto 10. I imagine in both cases pressing the break key, or similar, is all you need to end this loop anyway. If the computer was just sitting at the basic prompt it wasn't doing anything anyway.
- grammarnazzzi 5y ago
- Someone 5y ago
  > I think its fair to say computers this simple couldn't really be sabotaged Maybe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke
  - drzaiusapelord 5y ago
    Wow thank you for this! Ive never heard of this. The early days were truly crazy.

duxup 5y ago

I think he just wanted to trigger an easter egg.

adenozine 5y ago

No, he was expecting the behavior of an Easter egg, which had been removed in a debug sweep because it could collide with typical usage of a command in BASIC. So, his command should've done a neat trick, and it didn't, and he was furious.

geocrasher 5y ago

Bill Gates was trying to show off an Easter Egg (hidden silly feature) that he himself had planted in DOS. Unbeknownst to him, it had been removed. Instead of printing "MICROSOFT" 10 times, it hung the machine.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
it was BASIC, not DOS. I think this was a Commodore computer he was talking about.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Funny thing is I know it's BASIC and not DOS but I still wrote DOS. I blame lack of sleep, caffeine, and... something. But yeah my mistake there.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

consultutah 5y ago

Sort of, but on accident. He expected the command he entered to trigger the Easter egg and print Microsoft 10 times, but on the PET, they had removed the Easter egg.

barbecue_sauce 5y ago

I presume his intention was to show off the Microsoft easter egg, but because it had been removed, it did not have the expected results. I don't think there was any intention to have a detrimental effect on the machine.

kragen 5y ago
Also hanging a computer is not sabotage unless it's doing something like moving a robot arm at the time. You just have to reboot it. For the PET this takes under a second.
- sitkack 5y ago
  https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/candea/candea.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi04/tech/full_papers/...
  - kragen 5y ago
    Yes, automatically restarting a subsystem can be much faster than a second, but you can't type a new BASIC command much faster than that anyway.
    - sitkack 5y ago
      So the basic interpreter could wake up, run, persist it state back to flash and shut the machine down between every keypress. That microreboot paper is in my top-k list. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=18263420374964189912&as_sdt=5,48&sciodt=0,48&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1826342037496418991...
      - kragen 5y ago
        Yup, although not on the PET, which didn't have Flash. On a modern computer you might be interested in minimizing power consumption, and probably on-chip SRAM is a cheaper place to persist the between-keystrokes state than Flash, which is usually ruinously power-hungry NOR. You can keep CMOS SRAM alive on microwatts from a coin-cell battery for many years, as you probably know. Or were you thinking about persisting consistent state for failure recovery after a power failure? What's your top-k list? Armando Fox's crash-only software paper is also very inspiring.

drzaiusapelord 5y ago

I think its fair to say computers this simple couldn't really be sabotaged. You'd just power cycle them and they'd be back to the basic prompt (I dunno if this computer needed basic run from disk or it booted into it like a TRS-80). This is just like writing 10 Print "Microsoft!" and 20 Goto 10. I imagine in both cases pressing the break key, or similar, is all you need to end this loop anyway. If the computer was just sitting at the basic prompt it wasn't doing anything anyway.

grammarnazzzi 5y ago
Someone 5y ago
> I think its fair to say computers this simple couldn't really be sabotaged Maybe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_poke
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
  Wow thank you for this! Ive never heard of this. The early days were truly crazy.