I saw mention of a "core dump" while lurking in religion and politics. I didn't want to post my story there, so I will here. While a university student at University of Guelph in 1976 I took a computer programming course. At that time the university had only one computer on the entire campus, that occupied a couple of rooms, plus the card "typing" room, which had several card readers, and the printer room which had a printer the size of a small car. I had to develop a program that would calculate all the prime numbers from 1- 500 using BASIC. The monitor gave you a card allowing a precious 1.7 seconds of computer time, you made up your cards, waited in line at the reader to run your program, and went to the printer room to get your results. We were pretty low on the access pecking order so we had to do this during the night.
My program was not very efficient, and needed a bit more time to run, so I had to get another card from the monitor that allowed a bit more time. I ran the program, walked down to the printer room to find the printer merrily making a big pile of paper on the floor. By the time I found the monitor in the coffee shop, the pile of paper was the size of the printer.
I had a non-voluntary interview with the head of the department first thing in the morning in order to determine that I was not, in fact, a hacker, and that a conflict between my rudimentary program and the new time card had created a core dump. The computer was attempting to print every bit of info in it's memory, all the marks, the universities finances and programs at once. The results didn't make any sense to me, but the dept head assured me that a "real" programmer could read it. My computer privileges were suspended pending an investigation, but after a couple of days they decided that I was too inept to have done it on purpose, and gave them back.
BTW, shortly after that they bought a second computer, which they called a "personal" computer, that had a 10" b&w crt screen, and a built in keyboard, that they could play games on. It was the size of two refrigerators side by side.

Yea I'd never admit it except in here ... but I have been known to read and analyse core files ... I feel like I am the one getting Anal-ized when I do that ... however the core files of today are no more than massive files you read with a myriad of tools ... regular searches and scripts can be run on them ... one of my achievements last year was to pull all the text between 2 provided time stamps/strings. Like you want to see everything between 11:24 01/02/2013 and 11:42 01/02/2013 ... or even ... "bla bla bla" and "Blah blah blah" ...

OK ... yea I am a geek and proud of it.

I tell people I have learnt nothing since 1993 etc etc ...

Cool.
Srinath.

My high school was situated above the police department. As part of Computer Science we had to use the VAX/VMS server which was located in the police department.

Half the time, upon log in, the server wouldn't recognize your login/username and would deny access. The solution was to reboot the computer and try again. It would always work after being rebooted.

A mischief oriented individual and myself created a fake log in splash screen that prompted for a username and password but always denied any entry. That program instantly emailed their log in info to my account.
The sport-o's never cared about Comp Sci and would never be in the lab. So we'd dupe one into logging in. It was all over then.
Modified the program to send it to their now dummy account instead of my own (covering my tracks) and left it running on all the computers before class.
I ended up getting the password for the head admin. With that password I was able to log into the town's database. I could run license plates to individuals, look up addresses, see property values and taxes.
I only logged on to that account twice as paranoia set in.


--Steve

I always feel so much better after a core dump... ...