the good old days of mainframe computers

[Ren]

(09-22-2021 02:09 AM)Don Shepherd Wrote:  I well remember working on such a mainframe Univac large computer at my first job. Rumor had it that there was a systems guy who crashed the computer on purpose (and it took much more than a divide by zero in a user program to do that). Upper management wanted to fire him, but the systems people knew how valuable he was and they overruled upper management.

At a former employer, one of my cow-orkers found a program called "CrashMe" on the Internet. (This was pre-WWW). And decided to try it on his Sun workstation.
Unfortunately, he cut and pasted it into a window that was logged into our main Sun server!
(No real harm done, other than a bunch of upset cow-orkers!)