Mem'ries, Mem'ries
So, looks like Borland is re-releasing the Turbo suite of programming tools. Most people are likely deciding they would be unable to provide an individual with a rodent’s hindquarters.
However, I took the chance to replay a fond [maybe] memory of high school computer science: when “Mon” [gawrsh, might as well work another inside joke in there somewhere!] said that we should use Borland for our linked list program because, I quote, “The CodeWarrior compiler has a bug.”
The implausibility of a compiler being shipped unable to handle the fundamental dynamic-length memory structure in C obviously did not occur to our Hero.
So, our other Hero, our True Hero, identified that a pointer was allocated at load and promptly dereferenced without initialization, causing the persnicketty little Windows environment to dump core.
Up to then, it had been a fortunate event for our [original] Hero’s ego that DOS (and, hence, Borland, which was a dinosaur even then) was not so kind as to check your memory accesses and dump core if something isn’t entirely copacetic.
It took our True Hero some time to reassure, cajole, and force our [original] Hero into believing that said issue was all that was going on. There was a scene.
It was embarassing, to say the least. Not as embarassing as the Yahtzee episode, which Steve occasionally mentions still to this day. But, pretty dang embarassing.
It’s really nice to think that it might have been possible to overwrite anything you wanted in DOS memory with a creatively-arranged negative array index.
I’ll avoid recounting Yahtzee at this moment, but I do remember the time Norwood was making all the innuendo about “Isn’t it funny when someone doesn’t notice the slip of her skirt is showing?”
That woman could say anything she wanted to say; those not supposed to understand thought she was nuts, and the other half of the class was cracking up. Nice skill to have, but it takes some serious reputation-building to work fully.