
Hellandizing (1998) - signa11
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/hellandizing.html
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lakkal
Someone posted a link to multicans.org a few years ago and I spent a few very
good hours binge-reading everything on the site. Stories of those days are
great to read.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Me too. Example find involves stacks. I always hated things like stack
canaries. I said they should just fix the problem of data flowing toward stack
pointer. MULTICS had a reverse stack. Overflows dropped into newly allocated
memory. Makes much more sense...

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logicallee
Nice read.

It is interesting to speculate (I wasn't an active programmer then) that this
is what the world looked like before TDD.

There may not have been unit tests. Your automated test coverage might have
been 0%. So when it came to knowing whether your program worked - you went in
and broke it.

~~~
cr0sh
Realize that this was also for Tandem - makers of the "Non-Stop" systems with
5 9's reliability (these machines incorporated such things that you could
upgrade the ram while it ran, pull things out and it would keep going - even a
cpu, etc - it used redundancy and a variety of other special stuff in the OS
and was pretty lengendary). Which might explain some of the strange things
this kind of testing system can do (ie - crash the CPU).

I don't think for most regular systems that this is what the world of testing
looked like in the 90s (definitely not from my perspective at the time - I was
neck-deep in a VB5 project then).

This does seem like an interesting method of testing, though, for those Tandem
systems. I'm not sure if those systems are still available today, but I
wouldn't doubt that there are examples still running (likely banking/financial
sector - where IIRC is where they were mostly used).

