Awesome... a professor told me about this too... I was wondering why this story appeared only today in ycombinator, since this is an old stuff... not so weird: I've noticed that the mail has been sent in 1997... :)

Maybe people haven't wanted to duplicate everything that has been on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/xmq0/what_reall...

For anyone who has to explain why concurrency is serious business (prof, TA, etc), this is an awesome example.

Hardcore debugging, too. Can't ever be too good at debugging.

The Prof. told this story in a graduate Opeating Systems class I took once upon a time.