Engineering Practical Jokes
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Robotics Developer
The EDGAR story reminds me of my first job out of college. We used Nova 3s for ...
Dr.BJM
Engineers retaliate with a PDP-11 OS hack
Chuck Hill
1/7/2011 7:55 AM EST
This story is for the people who remember the RSX-11 operating system (DEC PDP-11)and enjoy a good tale about engineering ingenuity and practical jokes. I worked for a company the used PDP11s as an embedded computer in a test system. RSX-11 was a multiuser operating system that had (as all computers in the late 70's did) a simple ASCII CLI.
The multiuser nature of RSX-11 was actually very handy in a test system because you could initiate a test and run additional processes to see the progress, or do detailed analysis of specific results, etc.
Also working for this company was a marketing person (we'll call him Dave) who had little respect for boundaries. He had a bad habit of coming down to the engineering lab to do demos for customers and even sometimes just his friends. The problem is he often interrupted a test that was running overnight to show off his skill at operating the tester. As you might expect this caused a significant amount of friction between engineering and Dave.
The solution the engineers came up with was EDGAR (I have forgotten what the acronym stood for). EDGAR was a shell, if you will, that disabled the CLI and intercepted all CLI functions. EDGAR had a few special properties. It disabled the ability to start and stop other processes. It changed the command syntax, just a little.
And it had a special error handling function. It kept track of the number of errors, and its reply got more obnoxious as the errors increased. Normally RSX-11 just printed ^^^^^ under the portion of the command line it did not understand. EDGAR would suggest additional remedial education, cast dispersions about your parenting, and suggest you go and find someone with an IQ above 50 to operate the equipment.
The engineers left EDGAR guarding their test and went to dinner. They returned later to find Dave screaming at the terminal, pounding on the keyboard and nearly in cardiac arrest. They told him that this was the new test operating system being shipped with the systems (just for that final twist). He went away, and EDGAR became a fixture of the lab environment for some years to come.
Author Chuck Hill has 30 years design experience in storage, and telecom fields. He has a Master’s Degree in Engineering from Arizona State University, and a Master’s Degree in Business from DeVry University.
Do you have a good example of an engineering practical joke? We'd love to hear about it and you could earn a cool $100! Extra credit if your story makes us laugh out loud. Email brian.fuller@ubm.com
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EEhWhatsUpDoc
1/7/2011 12:56 PM EST
Funny. I think you meant to say "cast aspersions" rather than "cast dispersions" - the latter sure means to say bad things about multimode fiber optics.
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Chuck.Hill
1/7/2011 10:53 PM EST
Thank you, you are correct. That's what I get for trying to use a $10 word.
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EEhWhatsUpDoc
1/7/2011 12:57 PM EST
Edit: "surely" lest I be chastised for a typo too.
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TJones
1/7/2011 1:15 PM EST
Great story.
So, what might 'EDGAR' have stood for?
Everytime Dave Gets Access, Resist.
:-)
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zeeglen
1/7/2011 1:46 PM EST
Eliminate Dave's Goofing ARound ?
Yes, great story.
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BobsUrUncle
1/7/2011 1:36 PM EST
That's a good one, Chuck.
We usually just farted in the guy's office and closed the door, but I like your approach too :-)
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Stargzer
1/7/2011 2:42 PM EST
Back in college (circa 1970) we had so many FORTRAN students miskeying the IBM 360 DOS JCL statement // EXEC LNKEDIT that we created a new program called LINKEDIT that printed out a message for them (Starting with "Attention Human Fool ..." and going downhill from there) that ended up telling them that to avoid further embarrassment the program was punching out the correct JCL statement "... on Unit 00F (the card punch)." Trouble is, the first day we had it active, no one had a mistyped card, so we had to slip one in on someone's deck.
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bob-obob
1/7/2011 2:51 PM EST
Enclosing their cube is a good start. Then you have to fill it with something. Better still, (and much less messy afterward) make it look filled when it really isn't. Our very best (so far?) was a cloth "roof" held up by a tent-pole like structure, with the cloth having Styrofoam "peanuts" 100% covering its surface.
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ffr2822
1/7/2011 3:13 PM EST
We've done a few (I'm a terrible[or is that great?] practical joker). Among them:
1) Covering desk in 3 inches of confetti.
2) Filling an office with balloons. Seriously. They were being popped for a week afterward.
3) Gift wrapped the manager's office. heh.
4) One word: Annoy-a-tron.
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karen.field
1/7/2011 5:35 PM EST
OR
Exasperating Dave Gets A Rude Surprise
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zeeglen
1/7/2011 5:52 PM EST
Good one, Karen. Just wondering, how many more of these EDGARisms can be created?
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David Ashton
1/8/2011 5:50 AM EST
Everytime, Dave Gets A Raspberry
Not sure how this translates in the US...? (A raspberry is British slang for a rude noise....)
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palf
1/7/2011 9:05 PM EST
Locking a cat in a filing cabinet and scaring the secretary to death (being the sixties, we had secretaries, not administration assistants). Just a little multivibrator oscillator with regen/saturation as I recall. No live cats were used in this operation.
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mercdragon
1/7/2011 9:23 PM EST
Please stop casting derision on the venerable PDP11 and RSX 11. I recently retired a PDP11, RSX 11M system that ran a conveyor system that had been installed back in the early 1980's. The PDP11 was not the point of failure, obtaining parts for the controls systems long out of production was the problem. The Senior Engineer's password was "NotAPC".
As for EDGAR - Enter Dave, Get Accumulated Results
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Chuck.Hill
1/7/2011 10:45 PM EST
I don't actually remember what EDGAR stood for, but knowing the engineers responsible for this prank, it was something we couldn't print anyway. But the suggestions are great.
One of the best "retaliations" for this individual came when he was away on a business trip. The engineers ducted the packing material chute from production to his office and filled it to the top with stryofoam peanuts. He had to get a ladder, pull up the ceiling tiles and shovel his way in from the top just to get the door open.
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parity
1/8/2011 1:19 AM EST
So this is where Eddie Haskel finally ended up.
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dov.barak
1/9/2011 4:17 AM EST
Good to see that there are living engineers remembering RSX 11M
I always look at the formidable size of today OS and remember how small and efficient RSX11M was..
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prabhakar_deosthali
1/11/2011 4:50 AM EST
I have been one of those who are lucky to have worked on RSX-11M. I was responsible to install a PDP-11 with RSX-11M based control system in India for a German Robotic Welding machine for a mini-truck chassis. The RSX-11m based system with the control software worked so well that we had our first maintenance call 5 years after the system was commissioned and the fault was not with the basic computer system but with one of the associated I/o cards. Later I got so much fascinated with RSX-11M as an OS ( with a very good documentation from DEC) that I designed an RTOS based upon the data structures of RSX-11M and used it in the embedded products of my company.
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Dr.BJM
1/15/2011 8:55 AM EST
It is cheer ful to recollect old memories.
This articles my good old day working COBOL68 on a PDP11 at Delhi.
Dr.B.Jothi Mohan
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Robotics Developer
1/21/2011 3:08 PM EST
The EDGAR story reminds me of my first job out of college. We used Nova 3s for the test stations and every software engineer carried their own operating system on (yes really) 5M removable disks. On particularly unique engineer had modified most of the commands and prompts on his version of the OS to some VERY rude alternatives. Well you knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, sales was escorting a potential new customer around the labs and ran across a system running Dave's OS (fake name). The attempts by the salesman to highlight system features were to say the least very PROVOCATIVE.. Next day a memo went out (yes, no emails then only hard copy paper) indicating to all staff that ONLY the standard OSes would be allowed due to a public relations problem caused by a "rogue" OS installation.
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