From: utzoo!watmath!rtris
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Title: cookie
Article-I.D.: watmath.2979
Posted: Fri Jul  9 11:56:16 1982
Received: Fri Jul  9 23:27:02 1982


A friend of mine is studying something like electrical engineering in Holland.
At his school they have an HP3000. The following seems to be a true story.

One day the system started to make demands. Every once in a while a message
would appear on the operators console: "I want a cookie". The operator would
of course ignore it and after a minute or so the system would crash. After
some weeks the correlation became clear and systems personnel (all one of them
probably) attempted to find where someone (probably a student) had jimmied the
operating system code. The operator shortly though found a simpler way around
the problem. Whenever the message appeared, he would now type in response:
"biscuit", and the system would go away satisfied!

                                                    Ralph.