JF Mezei wrote:
> Saw this as a "quote of the day" on a web site...
>
> Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
>
> BBW Branch Both Ways
> BEW Branch Either Way
> BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
> BH Branch and Hang
> BMR Branch Multiple Registers
> BOB Branch On Bug
> BPO Branch on Power Off
> BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
> CDS Condense and Destroy System
> CLBR Clobber Register
> CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately
> CM Circulate Memory
> CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
> CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
> CRN Convert to Roman Numerals


EPI Execute Programmer Immediate
BADC Branch and Dump Core
LACC Load and Clear Core
RWP Rewind Printer

On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 11:54:32 -0500, Richard B. gilbert
wrote in <45ED9CC8.3030203@comcast.net>:
> JF Mezei wrote:
>> Saw this as a "quote of the day" on a web site...

>> Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
>>
>> BBW Branch Both Ways
>> BEW Branch Either Way
>> BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
>> BH Branch and Hang
>> BMR Branch Multiple Registers
>> BOB Branch On Bug
>> BPO Branch on Power Off
>> BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
>> CDS Condense and Destroy System
>> CLBR Clobber Register
>> CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately
>> CM Circulate Memory
>> CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
>> CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
>> CRN Convert to Roman Numerals


> EPI Execute Programmer Immediate
> BADC Branch and Dump Core
> LACC Load and Clear Core
> RWP Rewind Printer

HCF Halt and Catch Fire

--
Ivan Reid, School of Engineering & Design, _____________ CMS Collaboration,
Brunel University. Ivan.Reid@[brunel.ac.uk|cern.ch] Room 40-1-B12, CERN
KotPT -- "for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty".

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007 18:44:32 +0000 (UTC)
"Dr Ivan D. Reid" wrote:

> On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 11:54:32 -0500, Richard B. gilbert
> wrote in <45ED9CC8.3030203@comcast.net>:
> > JF Mezei wrote:
> >> Saw this as a "quote of the day" on a web site...
>
> >> Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
> >>
> >> BBW Branch Both Ways
> >> BEW Branch Either Way
> >> BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
> >> BH Branch and Hang
> >> BMR Branch Multiple Registers
> >> BOB Branch On Bug
> >> BPO Branch on Power Off
> >> BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
> >> CDS Condense and Destroy System
> >> CLBR Clobber Register
> >> CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately
> >> CM Circulate Memory
> >> CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
> >> CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
> >> CRN Convert to Roman Numerals
>
>
> > EPI Execute Programmer Immediate
> > BADC Branch and Dump Core
> > LACC Load and Clear Core
> > RWP Rewind Printer
>
> HCF Halt and Catch Fire

SCP Stumble and Crush Programmer
FBE Fry Breaker and Explode
BHC Burn Hole in CRT
EPT Eat Paper Tape
LPC Laminate Punch Card
BRL Branch to Random Location
CPZNZ Convert Positive Zero to Negative Zero

(To be honest, these were invented for that paragon of hardware design,
the Control Data Cyber 17, aka "the 6502 without a stack", with an
assembler manual that explained in gory detail the bit layout of the
instructions but forgot to show you how to write them).

--
Stefaan A Eeckels
--
The one thing IT really needs to outsource is the freakin' clueless
managers that don't understand that there are more possibilities than
chaos on the one hand and the reduction of alternatives to zero on the
other. -- Richard Hamilton in comp.sys.sun.hardware

OK, didn't realise this would catch on.

The following came from McGill University. Part of the credit goes to Charles
Snow. It is IBM centric.


1 April 1982. IBM Assembler/G update

The following directives have just been released in the new version of IBM
360/370 Assembler language and are supported in the new extended version
of Assembler/G.



I/O DEVICE COMMANDS

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

BST Backspace and Stretch Tape Is user callable to increase length of
tape; also automatically called
recursively when physical end-of-tape is
encountered

CBD Crash and Burn Disc Causes heads to immediately crash onto
all surfaces of the specified device.

RFSC Read, Feed and Shred Card Used when high-security,read-only-once
decks are being loaded, NOTE: an as yet
unresolved bug causes this directive to
be executed randomly on certain real and
virtual card readers.


SNT Seek Non-existant Track Causes access arm on moving head drives
to be pushed off their drive tracks,
usually resulting in the arm being
physically dropped onto the disk. Most
often, this results in fatal read/write
errors from the physical device.

SSD Seek and Scar Disk Will seek to the specified cylinder, and
cause the head to contact surface of all
platters within than cylinder. All data
in that cyclinder is irrecoverably lost,
and in most cases, the drive head are
destroyed.

TTD Tape To Degausser Cause tape to be thrown off tape drive in
direction of degausser [direction
specified at sysgen time] for immediate
erasure. Note: (1) DO NOT use TTD with
BST. (2) Since the tapes are thrown off
the drive with some violence, injuries to
machine room personnel often result.
Please use this instruction with
discretion.

ZAT Zero All Tracks Writes nulls to all possible positions on
the specified disk device [including
areas used to contain formating
information].

ZVL Zero Volume Replace all current information about a
volume now found in the system catalog
with nulls. Useful when the user wishes
to hide volumes from the operating
system.



PRIVILEGED OPERATIONS

------------------------------------------------------------------------



AOS Auto Operator Stimulate Similar to the EOI instruction, but is
less severe. Used to attract operators'
attention (often as a prelude to
performing EOI, ie. to ensure an oprator
is near the operator console when the EOI
is performed).

DGA Downgrade Amdahl Causes Amdhal 470/V7 CPUs to be
downgraded to V7A without costly
additional hardware.

EBB Empty Bit Bicket Lose the contents of all the main memory.

EOI Execute Operator Immediately Causes Operator concole to
deliver severe electric shock (110VAC,
50Amps) to the next i individuals
contacting the console, where i is
arbritary.

HCF Halt and Catch Fire Halts CPU and causes immediate combustion
of CPU assembly. Note that use of HCF
instruction calls CPD for each disk
device currently mounted. HCF also
suppresses the operator message "IBM013I
SYSTEM ON FIRE".

POC Power off CPU Causes CPU to be powered off without
prior notification. NOTE: Use of this
instruction causes calling process to
abend and return no diagnostics.

RVC Reverse CPU Cause UPC to assume control. Usually
improves system performance.






O/S COMMANDS

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

DAT Drop All Terminals Causes all I/O devices (terminals, disk
controllers and spool driven devices) to
be physically and permanently
disconnected from the CPU.

IDL Incur Deadlock Forces process deadlock to effectively
halt all system operation


IOC Ignore Operator Console Causes all interrupts from the operator
console to be ignored.

IUOS Implement User OS Causes immediate and uninterruptible IPL
of user defined operating system.

LSC Lose System Catalog Replace all data entries in the system
catalog with nulls. Useful when the users
wishes to hide the operating system from
the operating system. NOTE: use of this
instruction will cause user process to
abend.

RSM Remove Supervisor Mode Disable supervisor protection on all
instructions. Allows users to perform any
formerly privileged instruction (useful
for performing virtual machine
debugging).

RVMR Run VM Recursively Initiate an arbritary number of recursive
calls to VM. Current hardware limitations
restrict maximum level of recursion to
20.

SOS Swap-out Op Sys Causes current virtual machine operating
system to be swapped out. USE WITH CARE


WDT Wait for Down Time Causes all running processes to wait or
CPU downtime before resuming execution.



STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING ENHANCEMENTS

------------------------------------------------------------------------

BRH Branch to Here Causes a branch to itself. Facilitates
the writing of efficient infinite loops.

MRM Branch Maybe Decision to perform a branch is
arbritary.

BOR Branch on Random Used to introduce randomness into
privileged instructions. (Note that the
WATFIV-W code "DO SOMETIMES" is
translated to the new BOR directive when
the optimize compile option is selected.

JF Mezei wrote in
news:c5e15$45edebd7$cef8887a$12612@TEKSAVVY.COM:

>
> OK, didn't realise this would catch on.
>
> The following came from McGill University. Part of the credit goes to
> Charles Snow. It is IBM centric.
>
>
> 1 April 1982. IBM Assembler/G update

Oh... this goes back way further than 1982. I first saw them in the late
60's. I suspect some of them pre-date the IBM 360 even.

> The following directives have just been released in the new version of
> IBM 360/370 Assembler language and are supported in the new extended
> version of Assembler/G.

Hmm...

I am missing the following in this thread, but it is certainly not my
invention!

RPM Read Programmers Mind

Bart Zorn

On Mar 6, 5:54 pm, "Richard B. gilbert"
wrote:
> JF Mezei wrote:
> > Saw this as a "quote of the day" on a web site...
>
> > Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
>
> > BBW Branch Both Ways
> > BEW Branch Either Way
> > BBBF Branch on Bit Bucket Full
> > BH Branch and Hang
> > BMR Branch Multiple Registers
> > BOB Branch On Bug
> > BPO Branch on Power Off
> > BST Backspace and Stretch Tape
> > CDS Condense and Destroy System
> > CLBR Clobber Register
> > CLBRI Clobber Register Immediately
> > CM Circulate Memory
> > CMFRM Come From -- essential for truly structured programming
> > CPPR Crumple Printer Paper and Rip
> > CRN Convert to Roman Numerals
>
> EPI Execute Programmer Immediate
> BADC Branch and Dump Core
> LACC Load and Clear Core
> RWP Rewind Printer

Someone mentioned the "Rewind Printer" instruction.

In real life, there was one that was very close.

The IBM 1620 (a machine many of us started on) usually had a
card reader and card punch. It also had two halt buttons on the
front console. The "Halt at End of Instruction" would usually
halt the machine as indicated. However, in some cases, you could
have an instruction that would never complete, such as a branch
to self. In that case, the "Halt in the Middle of an
Instruction" button was guaranteed by IBM to always halt the
machine immediately, even if it was in the middle of reading an
instruction (which was 12 characters long).

Someone discovered that you could issue a "read on the card
punch" instruction. This would cause a card to go through the
punch without being punched, but also without being read. Since
no data was returned, the punch was instructed to read another
card. This would continue as the punch ran through it's stack of
cards as fast as possible, at which point it would ask for more
cards. The Halt Immediately button would not stop it, you had to
power down the machine (which usually took 20 minutes or more to
restore).

Every time IBM sent a new support person out to the
University, someone would ask him if there was any instruction
that could not be halted by pressing the button. Being carefully
trained by IBM, he would of course always say that there was no
such instruction. He soon learned othewise.

--
B. Z. Lederman. My personal opinions.

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, JF Mezei wrote:

> It is IBM centric.

I'm sure one of those lists had an "Eject Selectric Ball" instruction.

--

Rob Brown b r o w n a t g m c l d o t c o m
G. Michaels Consulting Ltd. (780)438-9343 (voice)
Edmonton (780)437-3367 (FAX)
http://gmcl.com/

On Mar 7, 8:10 am, leder...@encompasserve.org (B. Z. Lederman) wrote:
> Someone mentioned the "Rewind Printer" instruction.

There were two things about some of the old band printers depending
upon the carriage control tape loaded into them. You could actually
backspace the printer 1 line, I think by including a "-" in the first
column (carriage control) field rather than the typical space. Every
now and again, someone would do that.

Other fun things is the long loop of "1"'s, causing page ejects. One
some of the really fast printers, you could almost shoot a fountain of
greenbar up the ceiling.

The last one I remember was repeatitively writing underscores across
the page, which would eventually cut it in two, then do a bunch of
page ejects. Since the paper wouldn't track right, it would all bunch
up into a nice jam inside the printer.

The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of the
"ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc). The Ops
would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy for them.

Those were the days... Some things just don't translate to a laser
printer...

davidc@montagar.com wrote:
> The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of the
> "ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc). The Ops
> would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy for them.

There was one of the enterprise as well.

And those things really slowed the printers down. I think it was something to do
with the band printers being designed to print letters much faster than rarely
used special characters.

I worked with 1403 printers surrounded by 10/15 students waiting for their
listing. Once, students shouted "the're smoke coming out of the printer", and
indeed there was. Overheating caused some grease to start generating smoke (no
fire yet :-)

One class (AI) had an assignment where students had to write a program to
generate a picture based on different characters being darker than others. For
that assignment, that poor 1403 printer was printing very slowly with students
waiting much longer for their listings.

JF Mezei wrote:
> davidc@montagar.com wrote:
>
>> The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of the
>> "ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc). The Ops
>> would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy for them.
>
>
> There was one of the enterprise as well.
>

Sam Harbison (Princeton) was one of the pioneers at this. He borrowed
an optical densitometer and measured the density of various overstrike
combinations. He then wrote a program to scan and convert photographs
and print them on the 1403N1 printer.

I seem to recall that he got one of his creations on the cover of "Time".

In article <1173295765.121929.108690@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups. com>, davidc@montagar.com writes:
> On Mar 7, 8:10 am, leder...@encompasserve.org (B. Z. Lederman) wrote:
>> Someone mentioned the "Rewind Printer" instruction.
>
> There were two things about some of the old band printers depending
> upon the carriage control tape loaded into them. You could actually
> backspace the printer 1 line, I think by including a "-" in the first
> column (carriage control) field rather than the typical space. Every
> now and again, someone would do that.
>
> Other fun things is the long loop of "1"'s, causing page ejects. One
> some of the really fast printers, you could almost shoot a fountain of
> greenbar up the ceiling.

If you generated output with a carriage control character not on the
carriage control tape, paper would eject even faster as the printer
endlessly searched for the character on the tape.

> The last one I remember was repeatitively writing underscores across
> the page, which would eventually cut it in two, then do a bunch of
> page ejects. Since the paper wouldn't track right, it would all bunch
> up into a nice jam inside the printer.
>
> The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of the
> "ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc). The Ops
> would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy for them.

I still have the "ASCII art" moon, etc. on a 9-trk IBM labeled tape, but
the last of the IBM 3420 drives left here a long time ago.

A blind CS professor even figured out a way to print braille on an IBM
1403. By setting the paper thickness to 4-part forms and placing an
elastic band between the hammers and the paper, it was possible to
create bumps in the paper by printing asterisks. The only problem was
that the output had to be folded and stacked by hand with the printer
hood up because the stacker rollers would otherwise compress the bumps.


George Cook
WVNET

JF Mezei wrote in
news:11c00$45ef2770$cef8887a$24825@TEKSAVVY.COM:

> davidc@montagar.com wrote:
>> The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of
>> the "ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc).
>> The Ops would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy
>> for them.
>
> There was one of the enterprise as well.
>
> And those things really slowed the printers down. I think it was
> something to do with the band printers being designed to print letters
> much faster than rarely used special characters.
>
> I worked with 1403 printers surrounded by 10/15 students waiting for
> their listing. Once, students shouted "the're smoke coming out of the
> printer", and indeed there was. Overheating caused some grease to
> start generating smoke (no fire yet :-)
>
> One class (AI) had an assignment where students had to write a program
> to generate a picture based on different characters being darker than
> others. For that assignment, that poor 1403 printer was printing very
> slowly with students waiting much longer for their listings.
>
>

I remember having too much free time at a government job. We had a number
of LG02 (line matrix) printers. The printer supported vector drawing and
someone had figured out how to make large characters with it so that they
could print names for the triangular wood blocks that were made for name
plates. With all that time, I looked over the file the person was creating
(by hand) for each person and I wrote a command procedure to prompt for a
person's name and title and then generated the file and printed it. (I
always printed to the same printer, even though we had at least 3 of them.)
After 2 separate incidents of having DEC come out to replace a number of
the print heads, I realized we needed to avoid repeated use of that
routine. I haven't seen one of those printers since I left that job.

On Wed, 7 Mar 2007 davidc@montagar.com wrote:

> On Mar 7, 8:10 am, leder...@encompasserve.org (B. Z. Lederman) wrote:
>
> Other fun things is the long loop of "1"'s, causing page ejects.
> One some of the really fast printers, you could almost shoot a
> fountain of greenbar up the ceiling.

On the IBM 1403 (I think) and earlier printers, the carriage control
tape (for some reason) never had channel C punched. So if you
requested skip to channel C on the printer, it would feed paper
continuously looking for the appropriate hole in the tape. The
printer had a stop button which stop at the end of current operation,
which of course never completed in this case. The 1403 also had a
"carriage stop" or some such button, which generated a forms check and
stopped things immediately. Before the "carriage stop" button, you
had to create your own forms check by tearing the paper.

The story at my school was that somebody had a program that sent
"Quick, put your foot in the box" to the system operator, and then
skipped to channel C on the printer. The operator had to rush across
the computer room and step in the box of paper feeding the printer,
tearing the paper and causing a forms check, thereby stopping the
cascading paper. They could see how quick the operator was by how
much paper they got back.

The more innocent way of causing the problem was by copying a FORTRAN
program from the card reader to the printer. The first character on
the line was the form control character. If there were any comments
in the program, ....


--

Rob Brown b r o w n a t g m c l d o t c o m
G. Michaels Consulting Ltd. (780)438-9343 (voice)
Edmonton (780)437-3367 (FAX)
http://gmcl.com/

In article ,
lederman@encompasserve.org (B. Z. Lederman) wrote:
> Someone mentioned the "Rewind Printer" instruction.
>
> In real life, there was one that was very close.
>
> The IBM 1620 (a machine many of us started on) usually had a
> card reader and card punch. It also had two halt buttons on the
> front console. The "Halt at End of Instruction" would usually
> halt the machine as indicated. However, in some cases, you could
> have an instruction that would never complete, such as a branch
> to self. In that case, the "Halt in the Middle of an
> Instruction" button was guaranteed by IBM to always halt the
> machine immediately, even if it was in the middle of reading an
> instruction (which was 12 characters long).
>
> Someone discovered that you could issue a "read on the card
> punch" instruction. This would cause a card to go through the
> punch without being punched, but also without being read. Since
> no data was returned, the punch was instructed to read another
> card. This would continue as the punch ran through it's stack of
> cards as fast as possible, at which point it would ask for more
> cards. The Halt Immediately button would not stop it, you had to
> power down the machine (which usually took 20 minutes or more to
> restore).

I didn't know this one. I don't think anybody did it at our
site; I don't remember having the system powered off.

>
> Every time IBM sent a new support person out to the
> University, someone would ask him if there was any instruction
> that could not be halted by pressing the button. Being carefully
> trained by IBM, he would of course always say that there was no
> such instruction. He soon learned othewise.

ROTFLAMO. That's initiation by ratatat fire.

/BAH

In article , cook@wvnvms.wvnet.edu (George Cook) wrote:


>A blind CS professor even figured out a way to print braille on an IBM
>1403. By setting the paper thickness to 4-part forms and placing an
>elastic band between the hammers and the paper, it was possible to
>create bumps in the paper by printing asterisks. The only problem was
>that the output had to be folded and stacked by hand with the printer
>hood up because the stacker rollers would otherwise compress the bumps.

That one is kewl. I'm always amazed at what people produce
if they're given half a chance to play. I think GUI takes
a lot of that tactile playing away.

/BAH

In article ,
Rob Brown wrote:
>On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, JF Mezei wrote:
>
>> It is IBM centric.
>
>I'm sure one of those lists had an "Eject Selectric Ball" instruction.

That would happen over your dead body. :-) I was the guard
of a especially made Selectric ball that included the []
characters.

/BAH

In article , jmfbahciv@aol.com writes:

>> Someone discovered that you could issue a "read on the card
>> punch" instruction. This would cause a card to go through the
>> punch without being punched, but also without being read. Since
>> no data was returned, the punch was instructed to read another
>> card. This would continue as the punch ran through it's stack of
>> cards as fast as possible, at which point it would ask for more
>> cards. The Halt Immediately button would not stop it, you had to
>> power down the machine (which usually took 20 minutes or more to
>> restore).
>
> I didn't know this one. I don't think anybody did it at our
> site; I don't remember having the system powered off.
>
>>
>> Every time IBM sent a new support person out to the
>> University, someone would ask him if there was any instruction
>> that could not be halted by pressing the button. Being carefully
>> trained by IBM, he would of course always say that there was no
>> such instruction. He soon learned othewise.
>
> ROTFLAMO. That's initiation by ratatat fire.

In case it wasn't obvious, I should point out that the
previous service technician apparently never clued in his
replacement about this, either.

--
B. Z. Lederman. My personal opinions.

On Mar 7, 3:31 pm, c...@wvnvms.wvnet.edu (George Cook) wrote:
> > The other thing people would do (myself included) is print some of the
> > "ASCII art" pictures (moon, spock, golden gate, kitten, etc). The Ops
> > would hate it, everyone else would want you to print a copy for them.
>
> I still have the "ASCII art" moon, etc. on a 9-trk IBM labeled tape, but
> the last of the IBM 3420 drives left here a long time ago.

I have one somewhere, too. I wrote (and still have) software that
reads IBM SL tapes. Now my problem is finding a tape drive... I know
someone who has one, maybe I can snag it sometime.