since we're reminiscing, we did this at dallas ietf in 1995, i think it was (yes, http://merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/2000-11/msg00222.html). we had hit a timer bug in is-is that was causing routers to lose adjacencies. ravi sat down at a terminal, found the bug in the code, compiled a new image, and we loaded and "rebooted the network" that evening. nasty, but fun. we don't seem to have fun like this anymore.
(maybe it wasn't as simple as ravi "finding the bug", but i do seem to remember he fixed this in short order)
-b