[TUHS] PDP-11/70 in Cory Hall, Berkeley '74 or 75 / fork bomb

[David Barto via TUHS]

> On Oct 5, 2025, at 5:21 PM, Jim Mellander via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> I devoured the thick white Unix manual of the day, and, I hesitate to
> admit, wrote a trivial shell fork bomb which just spawned additional copies
> of itself in the background. I remember firing it up on an ASR-33, and it
> printed out the PIDs slower and slower until the system froze. I tore off
> the printout and left.
> 


Back in the late 70’s (78-79) I wrote a shell script to process some files I had
on sdcsvax. Shell functions where new and by mistake I used the script name
as a function name.

I ran my test and it did what I expected, so I logged out.

Little did I know at the time that the script had forked itself and was now on a runaway path
to take the machine down.

Next time I logged in I had receive a message from Brian Kantor (the sdcsvax admin at the time)
with a listing of processes running on the machine and the admonition:

       Don’t do this again.

A humbling experience.

	David

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and Stupidity	- Harlan Ellison

David Barto
barto at kdbarto.org