Our tall office building had a large mainframe accessed by developer terminal rooms on many floors.
One morning the O/S crashed. A post mortem memory image was written to tape and the O/S reloaded.
The tape was then printed - or rather it started to print before the O/S crashed again. This happened several times before it was decided to isolate all the terminals while the tape was printed.
This was successful - but as soon as the O/S was reloaded it crashed again fairly quickly.
I scanned the dump - spotted the bug and went to the indicated terminal in the building. There was a programmer sitting at the terminal fretting that the system had gone down yet again as she tried to type her BASIC program. She complained - "Every time I get to this line your system stops working".
She had decided to number her statement lines from 1000000 - an unexpected range for which the BASIC compiler had no contingency handling.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
