Quite possibly the dumbest intern ever hired. Hopefully, he was doing it gratis.
There was a late-night system operator working at a soft drink company (I’ll say it, Fanta,) who was responsible for watching their Sco UNIX system at night, who saw alerts that the system’s / (root) filesystem was full, so he logged on to the console and thought he’d delete the development system to free-up space on the file system.
Once he logged on, he deleted the /dev directory, and the computer immediately went into “Helen Keller Mode,” deaf, dumb and blind.
Thankfully they had the up to date cpio backup, and after booting from the root & boot installation disks, I created a couple of special device files using mknod for the file systems and the tape drive, and was able to do a complete restore.
It only took a couple of hours, but it was 11pm on a Saturday night, so it was at $300/hr back in the early 1990s.
Mark
Speaking of games, one of the earliest FPS games that could be played over a network was “Doom,” and it worked quite nicely over IPX (Novell) networks. The only problem was that a) it used broadcasts, and b) unlike IP routers, by default IPX routers forwarded broadcasts.
For those not familiar with networks, when there were large, complex networks with multiple routers, this could result in broadcast storms, which can effectively crash the entire network, eating up all the network bandwidth.
The first time they tried playing it at lunch, it brought down a large segment of the network at a military base.
Mark