I guess the best story I have in that genre comes from my first work term in Fall 1977, while debugging a multiplication routine in assembler.

After running a few tests, it became clear than a Branch If Greater Than worked fine if the difference between the two operands was large, and it continued to work down to a difference of two, but a difference of one wouldn't take the correct branch. After checking and rechecking my work, I threw myself on the mercy of the harware engineer, who got out his scope and hooked it up to the backplace, then confirmed that there was 'some noise' there. He removed and reattached some wires, checked his work, and after that my code worked fine.

--t. alex
but my friends call me T.

Update: Deleted a redundant 'after that' at the end.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.