Late 1970s. Two interns are reading system call manuals; we're on a v6 Unix system, running on a PDP-11/45.
Like many bad ideas, it starts with an innocent question: "What happens if we recursively fork?"
Five minutes and a couple of C compiles later, we're sitting at the DEC printing console watching the system panic. The sysadmin comes running in a minute later.
"What did you THINK would happen?"
We explained that we didn't know, and we wanted to find out. He rebooted the system, fixed up a couple of busted inodes with ncheck and clri and so forth (this, children, was in the days before fsck...) and went back to his meeting, grumbling "... (inaudible) interns..."
And that's when I got seriously interested in how kernels worked.
Not exactly the same, but my dad told me the story that when he was in computer-lab in college, it was the first class in his school to have brand new Apple II computers. They drummed into the students' heads "these are not all connected to the central mainframe; if you ever break something, just reboot the computer and everything will be cleared and it'll be fine".
Well, I guess my dad took that as a challenge, and doing something using some weird recursive assembly and trying to reclaim some extra RAM by using the ROM chip (not 100% sure what he was trying to do), he managed to completely brick the machine, permanently breaking it.
Apparently they were pretty pissed at him, but he rebutted with "Well, you guys told me that I couldn't break it just by coding!" I guess they begrudgingly agreed and never tried to make him pay for it or anything like that, but they did announce to the class the next day that apparently you can break the machines, and to not do anything too clever without a professor looking at it.
Like many bad ideas, it starts with an innocent question: "What happens if we recursively fork?"
Five minutes and a couple of C compiles later, we're sitting at the DEC printing console watching the system panic. The sysadmin comes running in a minute later.
"What did you THINK would happen?"
We explained that we didn't know, and we wanted to find out. He rebooted the system, fixed up a couple of busted inodes with ncheck and clri and so forth (this, children, was in the days before fsck...) and went back to his meeting, grumbling "... (inaudible) interns..."
And that's when I got seriously interested in how kernels worked.