Gregory's Server
@TheGibson Porting the NAG serial ForTran library to the Parsys Supernode, I had a directory with a lot of files.
$ "ls -al" ...
It took a while, then a while longer, then people started to raise their heads and wonder what was happening.
Turned out that "ls" was compiled with a fixed size table that I'd just overrun. By a lot. And by coincidence, smashed the stack and overwrote some important OS code.
It wiped the main disk, and everyone's work.
After that when anyone saw me coming ...
@TheGibson ... they would back up their work across the network[*] and logoff.
[*] The networking could only transfer files, so remote logins weren't possible. That had the benefit that you could see everyone else who was using the machine.
I always had the machine to myself after that, and I paid others the courtesy of letting people know when I'd be working on it so we could coordinate timings.
It really wasn't my fault, but it remains an interesting story.