> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List On Behalf Of Skip Robinson
>
> Dang, Patrick, how did I miss the connection? Once upon a
> time, JES2 undertook to manage a newfangled print gismo the
> same way they always had:
> start, stop, ship data, handle glitches, the whole enchilada.
> This newly bred puppy, the 3800, proved to be famously ill
> mannered. It not only laid waste to the surrounding
> landscape, it got its master in serious trouble with the
> whole neighborhood. At a time when 'FSS' was still just a
> euphemism for something vulgar, JES2 was desperate to impose
> some order on the 3800 chaos.
>
> For one particularly troublesome set of circumstances, a
> short term maneuver was proposed: 'throw up our programmatic
> hands and start over'.
> The problem was how to 'start over' in the middle of some
> very complex code? Someone noticed that there was already a
> robust error handling routine that got control in case of
> JES2 main task abend. This routine cleaned up the 3800 tangle
> and returned to a known and workable restart point. Trouble
> was, the error condition that required 'recovery' was often
> no more than a printer return code that JES2 didn't know what
> to do with.
> So the ingenious solution was to branch deliberately to a
> specific literal string containing a conspicuous 'error
> message'. The resulting S0C1 would be recognized as an
> intentional punt (US football term), normal recovery would be
> invoked, and life would go on.
>
> Unfortunately, somewhere between conception, testing, and
> actual release--come on, did nobody see this before PTF
> GA?--the intended literal got (re)rendered as an EBCDIC
> string whose hex beginning fatally resembled a decimal OP
> code. So instead of S0C1, JES2 took a S0C7, which the
> recovery routine was not expecting. JES2 died on the spot,
> and sysprogs all over the world scratched their heads in disbelief.
>
> Now that really was funny.
Who'da thunk to _start_ a string with a null character? :-)
-jc-
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