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From: info-mac@uw-beaver
Newsgroups: fa.info-mac
Subject: (copy) Programmer's Switch vs On/Off Switch
Message-ID: <299@uw-beaver>
Date: Mon, 24-Dec-84 22:33:12 EST
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.299
Posted: Mon Dec 24 22:33:12 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Dec-84 02:19:06 EST
Sender: daemon@uw-beaver
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 13

From: QP2%CORNELLA.BITNET@Berkeley

There is indeed one (occasionally) important difference between rebooting with
the programmers' switch and with the on/off switch.  The programmers' switch
does *not* zero memory.  Of course, this makes no difference if everything you
run is totally bug-free...  We had a very bad spell before we learned this with
a bit of code that trashed something the Finder uesed in dealing with disks.
The result was that rebooting with the Programmers' switch and putting a good
disk into the drive was guaranteed to trash the disk -- even if you never wrote
to it.  We use the Programmers' switch when we think things are OK and just
want to boot of another disk, but shut off the power (and count to 10) if a
but of our code has gone tripping through memory in strange ways.
  -- Paul Velleman