Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?
I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix.It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand.About 10 minutes later, a bunch of graybeards come around the corner yelling “WTF are you doing!”Turns out that the dictionary that hit my hand was perched across two keyboards, holding down the “enter” keys of two terminals. Turns out that for reasons unknown, those terminals had to be repeatedly hitting the enter key in order for the logins and print jobs of about 40,000 people to work.