At 10:07 AM 4/8/97 +0200, Rolf Larsson wrote:
>People have been saying:
>> > So, any ideas on either problem? Is 'deadbeef' supposed to be some
>> > sort of sick twisted joke? :)
>> 
>> I'm afraid I can't contribute much to the discussion, but I can
>> at least point out that "deadbeef" is Sun's standard string to
>> insert into the kernel at a certain point in memory to keep an
>> eye on, and determine whether that block of memory has been
>> (wrongly) modified.
>
>IIRC, Sun also uses 0xcafebabe in their java classes. I have no
>idea for what, though...

Heh.

Commodore Amiga used several tricks like this. They used "0xdeadbeef" and
"0xc0dedbad" to help find memory errors in applications (no memory protection).

Actually, they used to use "0xc0edbabe" but somebody got pissed.

Also, some applications were smart enough to know that the system was going
down in a second or two, but were not smart enough to save the system. These
apps would then poke the ASCII text "Help!" onto page zero somewhere.

Fun stuff. Anybody feel like writing a script to generate all possible 
"words" and pass it against a spelling checker? No? Ah well.
--
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Junior, Comp. Sci.     -   House of Retrocomputing
XCOMM  mailto:kpneal@pobox.com              -   http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
XCOMM  kpneal@eos.ncsu.edu         " *** StarDOS makes great coffee! ***"
XCOMM From a mid-80's advertisement in "Compute's GAZETTE", a C64/C128 mag