@cstross Such bugs are far older than that.

The place I studied as an undergrad had a PDP-10 for campus-wide time sharing. ca. 1979 official IT staff (not that they were called that) moved most of their effort to getting new VAXes going as replacements. As part of that, they cancelled the weekly downtime to run diagnostics on the PDP-10.

That revealed a long-standing bug in TOP-10: some internal counter (I forget what, can't have been simple uptime in clock ticks on a system with 36-bit words) overflowed after about a month of uptime, causing havoc.

I forget whether DEC supplied a fix, IT staff (or us students helping keep the -10 running) rolled our own, or we just scheduled monthly reboots.

@oddhack @cstross I was happy to leave VMS behind when I left California. I wish I could do the same with Linux and return to something that really feels like Unix, but that doesn't exist any more.

Need to find time to assemble, at long last, my PiDP-11 and run 7/e on it.