In article ,
Chuck wrote:
Dan Caster wrote:

[ ... ]

Boy does this take me back. My first programming language was APL.

[ ... ]


We had 3 IBM2741 in an old broom closet with a 300baud phone line to
another campus that had the IBM 370-145 or maybe a 360 I forget.

[ ... ]

I also remember that we learned that if we sent and 5 ibeam 3e9 command
it would crash the whole ibm mainframe. Multi-user multi-tasking OS
were not what they are today.

Some of them still are not. About ten years ago, before my wife
retired, she (and the agency for which she worked) were doing testing on
a rather complex database system which a contractor was trying to
provide them.

In a meeting, the contractor was boasting about how robust it
was. Another co-worker said "Robust! I can bring it down with one
keystroke!

"Show us!"

So they went to a terminal logged onto the training database,
and the co-worker went through a series of steps which were all agreed
to be normal things, and ended up at a (yet another*) menu. And asked
"Everything is normal up to this point, right?". "Yes." "O.K., now!"
and she reached out and depressed *one* key.

It not only brought down the training database, but also the
production database which was running on the same machine. :-)


* "Yet another menu" -- there were so many menus on this system, with
*No* shortcuts, that my wife and I referred to this
system as "Menu Madness". :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.
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