He got the idea for one of these when he was paging through the Cryptonomicon and discovered an appendix that contained a listing of the Morse code. Randy knew Morse code when he was a Boy Scout, and learned it again a few years ago when he was studying for a ham radio license, and it doesn’t take him long to refresh his memory. And neither does it take him very long to write a little bit of code that turns his computer’s space bar into a Morse code key, so that he can talk to the machine by whacking out dots and dashes with his thumb. This might look a little conspicuous, if not for the fact that Randy spends half of his time reading text files in little windows on the screen, and the way you page through a text file in most UNIX systems is by whacking the space bar. All he has to do is whack it in a particular rhythm, a detail he’s relying on the surveillance guys to miss. The results all go into a buffer that is never displayed on the screen, and get written out to files with completely meaningless names. So, for example, Randy can whack out the following rhythm on his spacebar while pretending to read a lengthy section of the Cryptonomicon: