Re: Pleas for help from clueless students?

Years ago I was sitting in an almost-deserted lab putting the finishing
touches on my 'Real-Time Software and Interfacing' major project when I
was approached by a girl who asked me if I would "show her how to compile
her assignment".

Now this project was a semester's work all-up, although it involved some
hardware and software design. The software component was a few trivial
control loops written in pseudo-interrupt routines under minix. Most
students had problems wrapping their head around the software (it was a
hardware degree, not software) and many spent weeks getting something to
run. I was surprised that this girl was compiling her code for the first
time only a few *hours* before it was due...

Anyway, I showed her how to compile it. It compiled with no errors. She
asked me how to run it. I ran it on my board and - lo and behold - it ran
perfectly and did exactly what it was supposed to do.



I had an interesting experience when I was studying.
We were supposed to control an LSI-11.
The setup was a terminal connected to the LSI-11 and the LSI-11 was
connected to a PDP-11.
At boot, the LSI11 monitor would just bridge between the terminal and the
PDP-11.
The code was developed on the PDP-11 and downloaded into the LSI-11
and then the program was started

Me and a friend was supposed to develop a program which read input from
various sources
including the terminal, a keypad and a few other things.
Data was then sent to different output devices including an LCD and the
PDP-11.

The program was mainly developed at home and fed into the PDP11 and
downloaded/run.
To our dismay, the program immediately aborted and we were returned to the
PDP-11 prompt.
We tried downloading again, and got a major crash during download. Strange
character all over the screen.
Reset the LSI-11 and got the PDP-11 prompt again.
Tried downloading again and this time it worked, but when we ran the
program,
again we were returned to the PDP-11 prompt.

After testing a few times, we could see the pattern.
First time we download and run we are returned to the prompt.
Second time we download we get the crash.

Called the teacher, which could not explain the strange phenomena and
scratched his head...

Suddenly I realized what was going wrong...

The first time we downloaded our application it was written to the memory of
the LSI-11.
When we ran the program it started sending characters from the terminal to
the PDP-11
which returned a prompt every time it got a return character.

We were not "returned to the prompt", our program just worked as it was
supposed to...

The second time we downloaded, we overwrote the rtunning application, no
surprise that the crash occurs...

So you can be both clueless and bright at the same time...

--
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB


.

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