Lit. Buffer overruns 1710

The probability of that happening is 100%. Morten has whacked me over the head trying to figure out what my words mean. I am usually unaware that a term I've used all my working life (a.k.a DEC) doesn't exist now. It is also a fact of the computing biz that meanings of words change about every five years, especially the cybercurd.

And a general purpose timesharing OS can be at exec level (which is the level you think the OS is at) and-or user level.

Any real time system will cause the OS to keep hands off. TOPS-10 had an I-O method that allowed a program to tell the OS to keep its hands off. I can tell TOPS-10 to put my program at physical location nn. I can't think why I, an application, would want to do this, but there was code out in the that world that did.

TW would say, "A small matter of programming."

Have you ever looked at SIMH emulator and played with all the OSes it can run?

Other people are posting more examples that sound more recent. Look for them.

Yep.

Yep. Good. It can get worse. Think of a 100 of these jobs on the same system demanding all the same things at the same time.

Yup. Segments is an old way. Others have posted other ways. The -20 implemented demand paging.

In the olden days, it was called pink scheduling on the -10. The reason for the adjective is because that's the color of a particular light on a box (memory box?). Those lights that looked like they were white are red when half-lit.

Knowing why is very important. If you don't know that, you, as the programmmer, cannot decide what to do without messing up.

That's why our monitor would return error codes. Error codes told me why the monitor couldn't service me.

A request for resources that causes an overcommit is merely a warning from the app to the OS saying, "Be prepared." In an IBM data processing shop, the OS would delay scheduling the job until all the resources it needed was available.

It's perfectly reasonable behaviour for an OS to do this. Think about OS developers who have a teensy little system but wish to service users as if it were a GREAT BIG SYSTEM. Overcommitting is an obvious tradeoff.

It depends on how you want the computer to be used.

Oh, I use a Windows 3.1 under DOS 6.0. If I am writing up an email or a post, and the buffer where the text is getting stored grows too large, the first thing the f***ing OS will over write is my keyboard device driver which freezes the screen. This avoids the OS deciding there is something wrong, hurry up and write the FAT (which just got clobbered), then display itself. This always causes me to have to rebuild the file system.

It's how I accidently laid out the device drivers on this DOS machine and discovered that making the keyboard die was less painful than making the code servicing the file system die.

And when they discover that the programmer they've been swearing at is themselves, the embarbuttment will train them.

The best technique to cycle from maintenance to developement and back.

And that was the top bandaid you took off. :-)

IIRC, I told you E-mc^2 was a special case. The whole formula is one I just wrote. And there's something wrong with what I wrote but I have no idea what.

BAH

Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.