That time my first real program crashed my laptop for a full hour

I was following a tutorial last week to make a simple number guessing game in Python, but I messed up the loop. Instead of stopping after 10 tries, it just kept going forever. My laptop fan sounded like a jet engine and I had to hold the power button down. It took me a while to figure out I'd typed 'while guess != number' instead of 'while guess != number and tries < 10'. Has anyone else had a simple typo cause a total meltdown like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_elliot27d ago

I read about a guy who accidentally made an infinite loop in a C program back in college. It locked up the whole computer lab for like twenty minutes before they pulled the plug.

averysullivan27d ago

Come on @the_elliot, that's just a lab machine getting a little warm. Those old systems were built to handle stress tests. A simple infinite loop shouldn't crash anything modern. It's more likely someone panicked and hit the power button early. These stories get exaggerated over time. A forced reboot was probably overkill for a student's coding mistake.

logan_owens1415d ago

Yeah, "locked up the whole lab" is the key part. Avery's right that a single loop shouldn't crash things now, but back then? One bad pointer could make a whole shared system give up. Those old labs were a different kind of fragile.