Mike Ash’s recent Friday Q&A about signals mentioned SIGWINCH, the hearing of which always sends me down memory lane. My first professional bug was centered around SIGWINCH. By “professional bug”, I mean a bug that someone paid me actual money to fix during a period of employment. Straight out of college in the early 90’s I went to work for a company called Visix Software, which at the time sold a product called Looking Glass, a file browser much like the Macintosh Finder but for Unix.

(Originally published at Mac Edition) (2024 update: this is mainly here to describe some of the most fun I’ve had with computers, digging into more hardware-level stuff and exercising my C skillZ. Also probably the first long-form blog posts I’ve written. I’ve done little editing outside of what Porruka has already done) Early in the summer of 2003, I was contacted for a small contracting gig involving pulling data off of SCSI DAT tapes that were made from some other unix systems.