[comp.sys.next] Edit eats document when unable to save after panic

joe@oregon.uoregon.edu (10/16/90)

When a user recently ran about twelve huge Mathematica jobs at once 
over the network while I was working at the console, and thereby
managed to exhaust all available swap space on my cube, I discovered an
interesting phenomena (this behavior is under 1.0; who knows what happens
under 2.0?):

After getting a dialog box announcing that the disk was full, I attempted
to save the document I had been editing. I was then told that there was
insufficient space to save the document. Fine. Naively, I assumed that Edit
wouldn't destroy my old version of the document. Wrong!

I was horrified to find, after rebooting my machine and restoring my Dock
(it had been wiped by the panic) that the entire document was *gone*. Zero
bytes. Nada.

I caution you all strongly: be aware that Edit can byte you badly!

Joe (JOE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU or JOE@OREGON)
Statistical Programmer and Consultant
University of Oregon Computing Center