Re: Am I the insane one or what?

[Mabry Tyson <TYSON@ai.sri.com>]

Ah, war stories... what a way to "utilize" net bandwidth on April 1st!

My favorite 2 stories don't have to do with having source though...

I rebuilt the FEP filesystem on a running system (with only one disk).
That required having the machine's current world being where paging space
was going to be and the new world being put into an area where I wasn't
using the disk.  (I guess I'm not as much a techie as Barmar... both of us
had bashed FEP directories -- I built a new one on the fly and he rebuilt
his from the info on the disk.)

The other story is also very much doable on a lispm but not on other
systems.  I've forgotten just what was going on but I was patching a very
low level I/O function and had a typo.  The result was each time I typed
a character (on the keyboard or over a telnet session) I hit an unbound
variable error.  Even such things as ABORT and RESUME were affected.
However I did have the mouse and dynamic windows.  I'll leave it as an
exercise for the reader, but I was able to rebind the variable (to NIL)
with just that capability and so was able to use my buggy I/O function and
to go on with my session.  Try that on any other system in the universe!

(Ok, so without source I wouldn't have been in the position to do story 2.)

I guess computers are becoming commodities where most users don't know how
to fix them and call in experts who just pull out an old part and install a
new one (ie, software "upgrades," aka "Fix 2 bugs, create 3 more obscure
bugs and get paid for it").  I still like to put mine up on cinder blocks
and figure out how to get it to do just what *I* want it to do rather than
what someone else thought the average person wants.
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