[c-nsp] Ode to the old days

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2016, Howard Jones wrote:

> The good old days of absolutely shocking software testing...
> e.g. the Ascend Max software build that never released IPs from the assigned 
> client IP pool - 200 user connections later, the helpdesk goes crazy. Or the 
> awesome Nortel Baystack bugs where pressing the "wrong" key in the "wrong" 
> menu would just crash the whole stack. Both in GA firmware. Nortel had a 
> whole selection of similar issues in their errata.

If we're going down this road, Bay Networks is a vendor that gave me fits 
of rage in the mid-late 90s.  Bay Networks had a default CLI that was 
slightly north of useless at the time.  Anything useful on those routers 
had to be done through a GUI app called Site Manager (or Site Mangler, or
Site Damager).

In an effort to try to compete with IOS, they released an optional CLI
shell called BCC (their name: Bay Command Console.  Our name: Blatant
Cisco Clone).  It tried to emulate the look and feel of IOS on a Bay 
router, but at least in that very early version, was sorely lacking. 
Typing "delete ?" would not bring up a list of options to follow "delete", 
but instead it caused the router to delete every route entry it had and 
knock itself offline until it was rebooted.  Great fun in a lights-out 
facility and no out-of-band console access to the box :|

jms