3/22/2016 Ray's Intuitionby Ian Emmons, BBN Colleague
I had the pleasure of working with Ray Tomlinson on only one occasion. I was maintaining a sizable application that had developed one of those horrible bugs where the bug's occurrence leaves a piece of memory corrupted, but causes no immediate outward sign of a problem. Then some time later (often days or weeks), the corrupted memory would cause the process to crash. I worked on fixing this, on and off, for a couple months. While I was able to identify the nature of the corruption, I was not able to find the original cause of the bug. My manager suggested one day that I fly up to Cambridge (I'm in BBN's Virginia office) and try to see if Ray could help. Ray had never encountered the technology domain of my application before, so I gave Ray a tutorial and went over the code structure. At the end of just an hour and a half he sent me away to think. About 25 minutes later, he had found the problem. It was the most subtle, tricky bug I have ever seen in the course of my 20 years in the software industry. Comments are closed.
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