May and USS

[rrich]

"Hooray, Hooray!
The first of may.
Outdoors fornication season,
Starts today."

When US Steel had their data center on Murial Street (South side Pittsburgh) the above little ditty would appear on the console of one of the IBM 360 systems but only on May 1. (Yes 360 and yes it was as long time ago.)

The third or fourth year that this appeared, there was as group of engineers and programmers standing around the control console printer. (Like 5 AM as the operator was starting the system for the days processing.) They all had a good laugh and started to leave. An operations manager walked over to see why the group was on the operations floor. When he saw the message he was livid.

A friend of mine, a system programmer, who had just started working for USS, was given the task to find out who entered that little ditty into the start up sequence. He spent three months going through the archives and console logs attempting to find out who actually entered the code. He was able to determine about when but not who. He said that it was one of two individuals that were no longer with USS. (IMHO a stroke of genius.)

[art3427]

I remember a similar story from the very early days of computer programming.

Programmer A goes to his supervisor and asks for a raise.

Request denied.

Several months later Programmer is terminated due to down sizing.

At end of that pay period the company system kicks on and starts deleting ALL company data files.

No one knew why and the fight to stop it was only marginally successful.

Turns out Programmer A inserted a line that if his name ever did nor show up on a scheduled payroll function, the system was to automatically delete everything on the system.

Revenge is sweet.

art

[rrich]

May 2, 2010 9:31:26 GMT -6 art3427 said:

I remember a similar story from the very early days of computer programming.

Programmer A goes to his supervisor and asks for a raise.

Request denied.

Several months later Programmer is terminated due to down sizing.

At end of that pay period the company system kicks on and starts deleting ALL company data files.

No one knew why and the fight to stop it was only marginally successful.

Turns out Programmer A inserted a line that if his name ever did nor show up on a scheduled payroll function, the system was to automatically delete everything on the system.

Revenge is sweet.

art

I had done some consulting and wasn't sure if I was going to get paid. So I inserted some code that would skip the processing for the interrupt and reset everything waiting for the next interrupt. I made the code look like part of the header of the interrupt routine, It checked the system binary date and if later than four months after I wrote the code, just skip the processing.

About a three weeks after the check cleared the bank, I called the end client and said that I was looking at the code and noticed a bug. I needed to come in that evening and fix the problem. I removed the trap and was done in 15 minutes.

LOML got a nice set of china at employee pricing from the end client. (Like about 65% off list.)