I once (as a junior developer) had to write some software to format a massive text file for printing to an IBM line-printer (1403, model N1) .. this (1M) text file had to be checked a few times before it was printed, and that meant opening it up in an editor and verifying the data.
I got pretty sick of opening this file after half a day, because it had tons and tons of CR/LF's and my editor at the time rendered these with strange characters on the screen .. and I didn't like that, as a junior guy, so I just replaced the LF's with 00's. For some reason, this just worked fine in my local environment, and I was able to validate the data in the file before sending it off to the spool for printing, later in the afternoon.
About 3 minutes after I closed the job, the building got a fire alarm, and we all had to exit. Apparently there had been smoke detected in the operations room, where the printer was located, so the Halon systems went off, and we went into full-blown "Ops Reset" mode.
After an hour of hanging around the parking lot, I was called in by the head honcho's in the Ops Room, sat down in front of the printer, and told to explain myself.
Well, turns out, I was responsible. The lack of LF's in the text file meant that the printer was printing - as fast as it could - every single line on the very first character position .. and after a few minutes, the printer simply caught fire.
Oh man, since that day (mid-80's), I've eschewed any job that requires me to deal with printers, and I've been anti-printer ever since. ;)
I got pretty sick of opening this file after half a day, because it had tons and tons of CR/LF's and my editor at the time rendered these with strange characters on the screen .. and I didn't like that, as a junior guy, so I just replaced the LF's with 00's. For some reason, this just worked fine in my local environment, and I was able to validate the data in the file before sending it off to the spool for printing, later in the afternoon.
About 3 minutes after I closed the job, the building got a fire alarm, and we all had to exit. Apparently there had been smoke detected in the operations room, where the printer was located, so the Halon systems went off, and we went into full-blown "Ops Reset" mode.
After an hour of hanging around the parking lot, I was called in by the head honcho's in the Ops Room, sat down in front of the printer, and told to explain myself.
Well, turns out, I was responsible. The lack of LF's in the text file meant that the printer was printing - as fast as it could - every single line on the very first character position .. and after a few minutes, the printer simply caught fire.
Oh man, since that day (mid-80's), I've eschewed any job that requires me to deal with printers, and I've been anti-printer ever since. ;)