I have a feeling though that if the two of them did something similar today, they would be looking at some legal action against them.
Pretty funny story, thanks for sharing. When I used to work desktop support, I ran into a few instances of malware that used this nasty tactic of two or more daemons that restart each other.
Stories like this pop up on HN over and over, (The same stories.) instead of waiting for reruns, is there some kind of place where they've all been collected? (Sort of like folklore.org)
EDIT: Besides the jargon file(s).
I've got a feeling that I first heard this story in the paperback version of the Jargon File - The New Hacker's Dictionary (3rd Ed). That book alone is a pretty great compendium of stories from the 70s and 80s.
The paperback is just a printout of the online (living?) version that esr still maintains.
I was introduced to this story in a computer science class assignment which tasked me with replicating this pair of programs (it ran in Linux). Testing it was a PITA!
I love these types of stories on HN... wish we had more of them.