From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie) Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 14:44:46 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Source code abundance? In-Reply-To: <20170307152851.GA16946@mcvoy.com> References: <23bbfb06-2de6-a9e1-0786-3f46d17c1192@kilonet.net> <20170306153317.GA23881@indra.papnet.eu> <005c01d29699$10330ef0$30992cd0$@ronnatalie.com> <00e101d29754$8e61b220$ab251660$@ronnatalie.com> <00f001d29755$62245bd0$266d1370$@ronnatalie.com> <20170307152851.GA16946@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <007901d2977b$47009dc0$d501d940$@ronnatalie.com> > Personally, so long as it wasn't garbage code, I've always been sort of stoked to stumble across my code in strange places. It's fun to think that people found it useful. It wasn't one of my UNIX things, but I had written our own standalone PDP-11 router system (we originally used MIT's C-Gateway but Noel got exiled for a while and it kind of languished so I wrote my own). About a year or two after I wrote it I got a call from NASA: ME: Hello. NASA: We brought a VAX up on our network and now the gateway is printing errors. ME: OK, what sort of error. NASA: Well... we're not sure exactly. ME: (thinking about my error messages) Did it just print out some register in octal or something? NASA: It was from the interlan driver. ME: (now wondering why they're being real cagey about things) What does it say exactly? NASA: It was something about trailers. ME: (thinking)...Oh, is it "TRAILERS MAKE ME BARF?" NASA: Yes, that was it. This was back before BSD used the ARP protocol numbers to negotiate if the other machine wanted to use trailers. It just always did them or not based on an ifconfig option. While trailers were a great idea for the paging structure of the VAX they were a bad idea for my code (which wanted to find the IP header at a fixed place not the beginning of the payload data).