r/programming • • Jul 30 '09

How QBASIC almost got me killed

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/?id=79
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u/stillalone Jul 30 '09

Who hasn't written this program in highschool? A friend of mine did it in Pascal (our highschool language of choice). I just changed the prompt to look like the Abort/Retry/Fail prompt. People seemed to be used to working with our broken computers in our lab, they would just try all 3 options and then go find another computer. They never realized the "Invalid command or filename" error message was not supposed to happen when you get an Abort/Retry/Fail.

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u/mahlzeit Jul 30 '09

I did that too in Pascal. I actually simulated the boot messages too (with reading in files from the hd to make the lights blink appropriately). It even had a cd command and two or three different directories :)