It was the dreaded "thick printed output" in ancient days of IBM mainframes. It meant your program crashed overnight. In the old days you batch compiled and batch ran your program from punch card job deck. If you were a poor student you probably ran your jobs at night because your dollars went three times farther then. Researchers on fat government grants and school administration could afford day runs.
For the most part these dumps werent too useful beyond the contents of machine registers. You could probably figure out where you died in the code. If you were computing a scientific array of numbers in memory you could probably see how the computation got and whether it was generating garbage. Also in the old days you bought like 16 kilobytes or 64 kilobytes of core, so a full dump printout was super large.
I think you could tailor the format of the dump with the Job Control Language. But I dont remember.
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It was the dreaded "thick printed output" in ancient days of IBM mainframes. It meant your program crashed overnight. In the old days you batch compiled and batch ran your program from punch card job deck. If you were a poor student you probably ran your jobs at night because your dollars went three times farther then. Researchers on fat government grants and school administration could afford day runs.
For the most part these dumps werent too useful beyond the contents of machine registers. You could probably figure out where you died in the code. If you were computing a scientific array of numbers in memory you could probably see how the computation got and whether it was generating garbage. Also in the old days you bought like 16 kilobytes or 64 kilobytes of core, so a full dump printout was super large.
I think you could tailor the format of the dump with the Job Control Language. But I dont remember.