Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!fluke!kurt From: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: computer (industry) follies Message-ID: <5269@fluke.COM> Date: 22 Sep 88 15:55:38 GMT References: <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <57438@ti-csl.CSNET> <741@etive.ed.ac.uk> <492@sp7040.UUCP> <827@cernvax.UUCP> <4892@saturn.ucsc.edu> Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA Lines: 13 An engineering undergrad I knew was doing some Fortran program for her intro to engineering computing class on a Prime. (Sorry, I can't remember partic- ulars of the OS she was using.) She was just cleaning up and commenting a program due in a couple of hours. Well, to make a long story short, it seem that in the editor she was using, "del" meant delete-a-line, but "delete" meant delete-a-file. Her program disappeared and she panicked. She tried to get out of the editor. Of course it politely asked her "really save file", but it always does this when you've modified the file, so she said "yes". Needless to say, backups were unavailable to lowly undergrads. She had to type the thing in from an old buggy listing and re-debug it. Pretty neat human engineering, huh?