“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here…”
I love these stories! There’s also,
And now that I’ve gone searching for these I see that they’ve all been helpfully collected on http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/index.html
Apparently, back in the days when a hard drive was the size of a clothes dryer, some enterprising engineering students would hack the device drivers so they could make the thing gradually scoot itself across the room using nothing but well-timed drive head thrashing.
That’s awesome. What a student thing to do, as well!
tldr: the code worked differently when a signed version of gettickcount was negative, giving a change that repeats over 49.7 days
impure functions and their consequences
The moon phase cycle is 29.5 days. The reported bug cycle is 49 days. Yet somehow, “Not strictly the cycle of the moon but close”.
With that sort of logical analysis ability, no wonder this guy struggles with stupid bugs.
