Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many
- Reference: 1725866894
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/09/09/who_me/
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This week's hero is a bloke we shall Regomize as "Rodney" who recalled an incident from his undergraduate days in the early 1980s. All the students worked on remote terminals – PCs not having become ubiquitous yet – connected to an Amdahl mainframe hidden somewhere deep in the bowels of the university.
Everyone who remembers the name Amdahl should now stroke your gray beards and nod sagely.
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Also somewhere deep in the bowels of the university was the person responsible for operating and maintaining the Amdahl mainframe: a being known only as OPERATOR. None of the students had met or even seen OPERATOR. For all they knew, OPERATOR could have been one person or many, or a dragon for that matter.
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One thing they knew was that OPERATOR was generally benevolent and helpful but lacked a sense of humor. This was an issue, as Rodney told us that humor was omnipresent on campus.
One example of this humor was a script that allowed a user on one console to send a message to another console user. The program came with a smallish set of predefined insults (mainly pinched from Monty Python) and it would pick one at random to send to the chosen victim.
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You can imagine the hilarity.
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[7]Developer tried to dress for success, but ended up attired for an expensive outage
[8]Cigarette break burned out a huge chunk of Africa's internet
Rodney used the program to great effect among his peers and it gained sufficient fame that a classmate asked for a copy. Rodney shared the script, but in the transfer process it somehow became corrupted.
The form of this corruption was simple, yet deadly. The variable in which one placed the intended recipient of the insult, which should have been %param1% , was instead hard-coded to OPERATOR .
You no doubt realize what happened next. Rodney's friend attempted to send himself an insult to check the program worked. Upon receiving nothing, he tried again. And again. And again …
After many failed attempts, Rodney’s friend was booted unceremoniously from the system by OPERATOR, who evidently did not appreciate being repeatedly told his father smelled of elderberries. OPERATOR sent a brief message with "some very harsh commentary from the engine room about wasting time and resources."
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Every attempt to log back in to plead his case was met with rejection.
Eventually Rodney's classmate explained the situation to the powers-that-be in order to be reinstated to the computer system. Of course, this involved identifying Rodney as the source of the offending script.
Thankfully the p-t-b were far less grumpy than the legendary OPERATOR, so no further disciplinary action was taken and Rodney was not sanctioned, which rather irked his friend.
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Python script in the early 1980's?!
... oh, Monty Python, not Python the language.
Re: Python script in the early 1980's?!
Do keep up at the back there!
Did Matlab run on Amdahls?
This may be where the "Invalid use of operator" message came from.
Somehow became corrupted?
I think the only way for that to happen is deliberately changing it. Perhaps as a lesson to understand what you are doing, not just blindly using something someone else wrote
Re: Somehow became corrupted?
As we see, stackoverflow-ification is not a new thing!
Re: Somehow became corrupted?
"not just blindly using something someone else wrote"
Or copied from the Internet as so much of the stuff from a certain large geographical region is.
Irked as it often takes my team longer to fix the crap than it would have taken for us to write it correctly, and we would be a much happier team and be able to more positively retain excellent staff.
Re: Somehow became corrupted?
"Irked as it often takes my team longer to fix the crap than it would have taken for us to write it correctly, and we would be a much happier team and be able to more positively retain excellent staff."
That, unfortunately, seems to be the way of the world these days. Or at least what management and procurement departments prefer.
A certain large, local petroleum company used to have an in-house translation department which worked with specialist freelance translators. That worked well, the translators earned a good living and delivered good translations. Now they're working with larger, lowest cost translation companies. Well, apparently lower costs - unfortunately the company's engineers now have to revised the outsourced translations and the engineers' hourly rates are several times that of their former freelance translators. (I gather some of their current translators don't know the difference between 'insulation' and 'isolation'.) So any apparent savings are negated by increased costs elsewhere in the process. And one of my current customers seems to be using unrevised machine translations for some of their training materials - with unintended hilarious results.
As one of their former freelance translators, and current shareholder, that makes me quite grumpy :(
And it looks like this also happens in the IT industry - my commiserations.
Re: Somehow became corrupted?
Ahhh... the old Beancounter Syndrome.
Beancounters tasked with reducing cost of Budget A. They do that, which drops quality and increases problems and costs elsewhere in the business. But that doesnt matter, because they were tasked with reducing the cost of Budget A, which they did. It doesnt matter that the costs to the whole business have increased and the increase in Budget B is now significantly higher than the saving in Budget A.
Recently had a similar problem with purchasing. We needed an electrical housing for a test fixture. A one of purchase, which we went out, found what we needed, gave all the details to purchasing. Total item cost €50. What did purchasing do, spend 3 days (!?!) searching for a lower cost item, before finding a box that was €5 cheaper but didnt meet any of our requirements. The time wasted looking for an alternative set our project back (due to loss of the booking at the test facility), and it was still a fight to get them to order what we had already identified.
But all those losses and delays were apparently fine by their boss, because they had followed procedure in finding alternatives... %/(&/)/=)%&/$&% (sometimes you wish there was a way to print a bunch of symbols to represent swearing like they did in the old Asterix comics...)
Re: Somehow became corrupted?
"Somehow became corrupted" was exactly what had happened to a little tool I was once asked to share. Miraculously, while in transfer, its Pascal code changed itself to add, if not already present, a certain string to autoexec.bat which would reboot (or shutdown - can't remember) the computer. Thinking of it, it would have been even funnier to automatically remove that string after one or two reboots and debugging would have been a real pain...
Confession: while working as a programmer for a well-known UK telecoms company in the early-mid 80s, I wrote a small script which sent the unfeasibly noisy line printer in the print room next to Accounts a sequence of characters that clacked out the rhythm of the Birdie Song in a loop: drr drr drr drr drr drr DRRR, drr drr drr drr drr drr DRRR, drr drr drr drr drr drr DRRR DRRR DRRR DRRR DRRR, etc. Much mirth ensued.
OPERATOR != BOFH
Evidently. Quicklime and carpets weren't involved in the sanction, for starters, nor was a cattle prod.