[Beowulf] [OT] Re: Religious wars

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 12:01:23PM -0400, Peter St. John wrote:
> 
> Did I just
> crash the DuPont Experimental Station Vax network? So I learned to quit out
> of emacs before I learned to enter into it.

When I first started at my current employer in 1983,
there were a scattering of mainframe (3270) terminals, all
of which presented a short list of login options. One of
these was TSO; that's what I had an account for and
was supposed to be using. But one of the other choices
was IMS [1]. One day, curiosity got the better of me and
I selected that. Anyone who has used IMS probably knows
what happened next: Big blank screen. I tried everything I
could think of to get out of there: "quit", "exit", "bye",
"logoff", "logout" -- nothing worked.  Even power cycling
the terminal of course does nothing on a 3270. Panicing at
that point, I sheepishly called the mainframe help desk,
and was told -- of course in a BOFH-ish tone of voice --
that the way you get out of there is with the "/RCL" command.
As with <ctrl-x><ctrl-c> in emacs, this was the only
command I ever learned in IMS. 

--Bob

[1] http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/ims/