> There was a bug in some versions of the Novell redirector shell (NET5.COM) that was a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program that ran under DOS. ... the very problem that triggered the error message had the unfortunate side effect of screwing up the ability of DOS to write to the screen. So only a part of the error message was actually written to the screen. What was that error message?
"There is a problem with the Memory Control Block for the shell"
^^^^^^^^
blem wit
This reminds me of a fun bug from back in the day in university, implementing an experimental stream-based language. The out-of-memory errors were very disconnected, because they occured in the VM - comparing it to the JVM, but without a real connection to the user code in the VM.
So they trapped the memory errors and put out the current upper-code level state of the VM to make it somewhat more debuggeable if the VM ran out of memory. Wonderful new feature to users, as now you had a clue where your code messed up and the VM failed. Very happy users.
Except, eventually someone accidentally added a memory allocation to the error reporting about memory exhaustion. Suddenly things just stopped doing useful stuff, hogged a core and didn't do anything else. Great fun.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadSo they trapped the memory errors and put out the current upper-code level state of the VM to make it somewhat more debuggeable if the VM ran out of memory. Wonderful new feature to users, as now you had a clue where your code messed up and the VM failed. Very happy users.
Except, eventually someone accidentally added a memory allocation to the error reporting about memory exhaustion. Suddenly things just stopped doing useful stuff, hogged a core and didn't do anything else. Great fun.