[TUHS] Has this been discussed on-list? How Unix changed Software.

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2022 at 11:07:19AM -0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
> > (Research) Unix ... 'shipped' with zero known bugs.
> 
> It wasn't a Utopia. Right from the start man pages reported BUGS,
> though many were infelicities, not implementation errors.
> 
> Dennis once ran a demo of a ubiquitous bug: buffer overflow. He fed a
> 2000-character line on stdin to every program in /bin. Many crashed.
> Nobody was surprised; and nobody was moved to fix the offenders. The
> misdesign principle that "no real-life input looks like that" fell
> into disrepute, but the bad stuff lived on. Some years down the road a
> paper appeared (in CACM?) that repeated Dennis's exercise.

Maybe this one?   	

B.P. Miller, L. Fredriksen, and B. So, "An Empirical Study of the Reliability
of UNIX Utilities", Communications of the ACM 33, 12 (December 1990). 

http://www.paradyn.org/papers/fuzz.pdf