Operatings Systems: reminiscences

The best error message I ever saw, and I may have mentioned this before, was from Lotus Notes. It was this:

0C:0D
Click to expand...

It's been a long time since I supported Notes so I can't remember what it signified.
 
I once wrote a piece of code which, when encountering an extreme overload situation, produced the error message "Houston, we have a problem". The tester who encountered it had to come and ask me what it meant.
 
Blue Bubble said:
I'm also a bit disappointed that nobody seems to have mentioned any of the CDC (Control Data Corporation) or Cray operating environments, though I was a mere vanilla user of those (Fortran edit-compile-link-run, lather, rinse, repeat ...).
Click to expand...
Yep, Control Data Cyber, mid 1970's. Learned Pascal on that thing, among many other languages. Who remembers SNOBOL?

But, of course, the editor I loved the most was EDT (Digital)WP. I never ever came to even begin to like EmacsWP ...
Click to expand...
Another EDT user here. But first, you had to graduate from TECO on RSTS/E...
 
eerok said:
My first OS was Unix Version 7 on a PDP-11/34. 64K RAM. Four 8" 1MB platters for storage. I learned to code C with the line editor and CC. What other coding tools would one need?
Click to expand...

My first DEC OS was PTOS on a PDP-11/20. You knew it was a two pass assembler because you had to feed it the source tape twice.

Unix came later. Somewhere around here is a listing of an early Unix version. The first comment says it is intended for playing games.
 
Norman Alexander said:
Yep, Control Data Cyber, mid 1970's. Learned Pascal on that thing, among many other languages. Who remembers SNOBOL?

Another EDT user here. But first, you had to graduate from TECO on RSTS/E...
Click to expand...

I was known as the SNOBOL expert on campus in the early 1970s.
 
Pixel42 said:
I once wrote a piece of code which, when encountering an extreme overload situation, produced the error message "Houston, we have a problem". The tester who encountered it had to come and ask me what it meant.
Click to expand...

And it's a misquote, as you may know.

This would be much more obscure: "Try SCE to AUX" (also Apollo).

ETA: For the overload, a better error would be "1202 alarm" (or 1201).
 
Last edited:
I was impressed that, within that context, SCE to AUX was thought of, sent, understood, and worked.

I just looked it up. Only one person knew what it could do, no one else knew it could work, it had never been tried before in this context, it was during lift off after a lightning strike scrambled all the telemetry. One of the astronauts knew where to find this switch quickly.

Sent from my TA-1024 using Tapatalk
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom