Back in the day...
...we had many Sun servers. Being cheapskates, we didn't endow them with the customary (and rather nice, for the time) Sun CRT and keyboard - they were only for workstations. Instead they had some ancient ICL serial terminals pressed into service for local consoles.
Now these ICL serial terminals had an interesting key layout, with a "break" key on the top-left, conveniently placed immediately above the return key and to the right of the backspace key. Pressing the "break" key, as one would expect, generated a serial-line break condition. Unfortunately these early Sun servers interpreted a serial line break on the console port as a "break to monitor", immediately and unconditionally halting the running OS (SunOS 3), and somewhat degrading their role as file servers or whatever. If you were quick, typing "cont" would restore normal operation, if not...
Yes, I pressed it by accident. And learned to type "cont" very quickly. As did others, who weren't so familiar with the foibles of this setup. By the time they'd typed a few *nix commands into the monitor, figured things weren't quite right, and called someone over, it was too late to safely just continue (as we discovered the hard way), so a full reboot, and fsck, was required - usually most of an hours downtime.
Fun times...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
