RE: FONT STANDARDS

[Mailing List <mlist -at- ca -dot- rainbow -dot- com>]

 Bill Swallow [mailto:wswallow -at- nycap -dot- rr -dot- com] reminisced:
> LOL! I used to work for a software company catering to the telecomm
> industry, and the stuff was written for the AS/400... good ol' text
> interfaces, too!
 
> Well, we had one beauty of a screen in one of those 
> applications... It was
> blank, save for one unlabeled field in the middle of the 
> screen. It took any
> type of character, and a string of any length, without error 
> (only returned
> an error on a null entry, and yes I know that's an oxymoron). 
> No one knew
> why it was there, but no one wanted to remove it.
> 
> I think we documented around it by instructing people to type 
> "X" in the
> field and pressing Enter... I can't remember for certain.

I remember something just like that, years ago, at Philips.
After puzzling over it for a while, and offering up all 
sorts of plausible theories, we went to the developers.

Turns out that it was somebody's idea of a quick'n'dirty 
debug tool. They just paused the application near where 
the trouble occurred, and looked at the contents of various 
registers, etc. (using some [Alt]-key combination to flip 
from the interface to the underpinnings and back).

Un-pausing was done by putting a non-null in the box and 
hitting [Enter].

Of course, after they solved the problem of the moment, 
somebody forgot to remove their little Pause routine.
Undocumented feature.

/kevin