I posted a version of this story once before, but it bears repeating. I was working at Tymshare, maintaining the assembler and linker for the PDP-10 or the Sig

I posted a version of this story once before, but it bears repeating. I was working at Tymshare, maintaining the assembler and linker for the PDP-10 or the Sigma 7 (I don't quite remember which). The linker had a bad habit of leaving unused memory uninitialized. Every time you linked a program, the binary would be different. Functionally the same, but they wouldn't compare byte for byte. So my manager asked me to make sure the linker zeroed out all unused memory. After linking a program, the linker printed a message something like this: 8412 bytes used 439 bytes free The "bytes free" were that unused and uninitialized memory. The linker was a mess of spaghetti assembly code, and it was a real pain to find and fix all of the places where it failed to clear memory. My manager knew what a hassle this task was, and he was a chill dude. So just for fun I added a temporary message meant for his eyes only: 8412 bytes used 439 bytes free and it's pretty fucking clean I figured he would get a laugh out of this and then I'd remove it. Unfortunately my manager wasn't the first to see the message. His manager was giving a demo to a customer, and they were the first ones to see the message. Oops.