who me A warning in this week’s edition of Qui, jo? about the overuse of messages and the dangers of a careless character or two. Or three
Our story today comes from a reader Regomized as “Dan” and takes us back to the 1980s when he was working for a certain oil company.
In its place were two IBM systems. One was for interactive users and ran VM/CMS (a hypervisor with a lightweight single-user OS on top) and the other was a batch system running MVS.
In this era of mainframes, “there was a computer operator for each system,” Dan recalled, “largely responsible for changing the tapes.”
Our story is set long before the days of Slack, and even predates IRC, but operators still managed to communicate without having to physically speak to each other using the cp msg command. Something simple enough that allowed you to chat through the console. The incident happened just after lunch when the two operators were texting each other. This was also during the disaster thriller era The China Syndrome was making the rounds
For those who don’t know, The China Syndrome you’re dealing with a nuclear power plant dangerously close to meltdown. While this is definitely not a comedy, one of the operators decided that drama-inspired chips would be fair.
It was also his last day on the job (and, as things turned out, we suspect it would have been his last even if he hadn’t been working on his notice).
“He decided to have a little fun,” Dan recalled, “so he was texting about the movie.”
“When I got on the computer, the interactive system suddenly stopped for all 1,000 users in the company.”
That was… unexpected. Dan went to the system console, expecting to see some message about aborting and restarting the affected computer.
“Instead, what I saw was “msg mvsoperator Warning, warning, merge in progress!!! ###It must be shut down immediately!”
Ha ha, very funny. Except it wasn’t funny at all because the operator had forgotten something very important about the characters in the messages.
“The supervisor on duty ran out of her office to see why the system was down while I started laughing.”
“Unfortunately for the computer operator, the # was an end-of-line character, so the shutdown command was executed.”
A thousand pairs of thumbs moved as the computer reconnected. And the shutdown order? Within days, a system update appeared to add a simple message: “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Have you ever had a little harmless fun decluttering your office? Or were you the one forced to add this prompt when someone else did something really, really stupid? Confess all with an email to Who, Me? ®