Reply to post: BASIC Loop on a VAX

A 1970s magic trick: Take a card, any card, out of the deck and watch the IBM System/370 plunge into a death spiral

john 103

BASIC Loop on a VAX

Back in approx 1990 I was introduced to the University's VAX.

It had a BASIC (interpreter?) so using my Commodore 64 skills (& a colleagues terminal of course) I duly fired up the classic

10 Print "F*ck Off"

20 GOTO 10

I then started laughing as it filled the screen with expletives.

My poor unfortunate colleague had to ask the supervisor how to kill it.

The Supervisor tried CTRL-C, CTRL-Z etc but to no avail.

It turn out that the VAX would print to screen very slowly but would happily run lots of instructions so despite the program being killed it had a massive spool full of swear words ready to send to the screen.

Happy days.

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