[tlug] What does it take to make your computer crash?

["SL Baur" <steve@example.com>]

Continuing from the previous discussion, I want to pursue a
related thought.  The very first Unix machine I ever had at home,
a Stride 440 running a bastard System V/R2 in 1985, was relatively
stable.

O.K.  It had a trivial root hole in at, but I never allowed dialup on it.

Even so, I managed to crash it twice, one time catastrophically,
testing the limits.

On the first installation, I managed to miss the year by one, typing in
1984 instead of 1985.  Once the system hit multiuser, I noticed the
wrong year, su'd and corrected it.  Wrong move, noobsauce.  The
accounting subsystem immediately attempted to perform one years
worth of accounting and the system ground to a stop.  After a time,
I powercycled and rebooted.  I got lucky.  The filesystems were not
damaged.

I started worms(6) on both of the terminals connected to it and then
started more worms on top of those.  I probably could have recovered
from that, but I was Unix noob and ended up doing the power off/on
thingie.  Wrong move this time.  I managed to lose part of the /usr file
system and had to reinstall.  So let's mark the date, December 1985
as the first and *only* time I ever had to reinstall an O/S due to a crash
or for any other reason.  (Excluding the testing I did at Turbolinux
which is not a fair comparison).

Once I understood the limits, I backed down a bit and other than
that I had a most pleasant user experience.

So, folks who have had a pleasant and somewhat crash-free
experience on a popular commercial desktop O/S, I invite
comparisons.  Please include the number of times you have had
to reinstall the O/S from scratch.

-sb