Related but completely different: All MS-DOS programs built with Turbo/Borland Pascal stopped working on ~200+ MHz Pentium CPUs because of a sleep calibration loop that ended up going too fast and causing a divide by zero in the runtime library:
The x86 version, coded in assembly language, works at the right speed regardless of CPU speed. MobyGames has this to say [1]:
> "Alley Cat was one of the few games of the 1980s that was programmed with full attention to different PC speeds. It's an early, old game--yet it runs perfectly on any machine. The reason it runs on any computer today is, upon loading, the first thing it performs is a mathematical routine to determine the speed of your processor, and as of 2003 we've yet to build an Intel PC too fast to play it."
I had a lot of fun with this game back in the day, when I got my first PC, an XT clone (with Hercules graphics card and "amber" monochrome CRT!).
----
The British truly ruled the low-end computer market in Europe back then.
Thank you for bringing this back into my main memory. Spent so many hours playing this and completely forgot about it.
Quick search turned up a couple of sites where you can play this emulated online!
''The bug apparently results from the high 32 bits of the clock data type being declared as a 31 bit value instead of 32 bit in the pascal include files. The reason for this is lost to history, but early pascal compilers may have had problems with 32 bit unsigned numbers, possibly because the early Motorola 68000 processor chips didn't have 32 bit unsigned multiply operations.''
This doesn't really make sense as an explanation. For both signed and unsigned multiply, the 68000 has a 16x16 -> 32 multiply. This is indeed kind of inconvenient if you need to multiply 32-bit numbers, but 31-bit numbers are not any easier. If anything, the unsigned cases is easier to reason about than the signed one
There's nothing particularly magical about the Unix epoch.
When you have to debug the same event reported in five different timezones, and then see some ugly 13-digit numbers and immediately know that's milliseconds since a certain globally-coherent moment… That moment definitely starts to feel magic.
It's the beginning of time, everything before is Omphalos; even the Omphalos conjecture itself; Unix is meta like that.
Hmmm, about 2 weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, so I doubt it refers specifically to that.
As our customers for the Turbo Pascal product upgraded their machines, the application started to freeze on launch...
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/those-win9x-crashes-on-fast-mac...