OP here. Thanks for the remarks! That tale is apocryphal to me. I found it amusing, and telling in the sense that disasters are the last thing people think of, and for large enough systems (especially ones that have accreted over human generations) the organisational knowledge has probably been lost to retirement and death. And if you're lucky, maybe a scrap of it has survived. Then one's job is to do the requisite software archaeology to figure out what one's people might have entirely forgotten.

Also, if that script remained valid at the time, I doubt it would do any critical actions. It might have been a sort of literal script to follow --- run the script, see what it says, do a thing, run the script, and so forth. Its supposed job was to help humans solve a bootstrap problem.

I see how my wording of that passage makes it sound like the be-all end-all of cold booting a telco. But that's what we get when we wall-of-text in our Slacks :D

(edit: clarifying remarks)