The 80's

This piece brought a few memories and impressions forward.

One was hacking ULTIMA 2 and 3. Copy protection involved the bad sector technique. However, those programs did not do an in depth error check. Atari machines made a beep on each disk sector read.

To play a copy of the game, one just counted the beeps, open the drive door, wait for the error sound (how handy is all that?), then close the door and carry on.

Chain smoking... all through primary and most of high school, the teachers lounges were filled with tobacco smoke. To their credit, the educators did not reek in class, well one did, but those areas of the building did.

All grades were old school analog, in the grade book, in pen. Changes were done with a strike through, new value, initial.

One of my peers wrote a book report program in BASIC that would generate a fairly healthy set of variations. The seed was a wait for input loop. Was double digit report success before there were questions.

Someone plugged an expansion card into a running Apple ][ computer and killed it. Despite a dead CPU, it displayed video anyway. Was my first real experience with simple hardware vs custom chips. Those computers did not have the spiffy sprites, colors and sounds the C64 and Atari machines had, but they did have just enough of the things that really mattered when it came down to getting real work done. Someone looked the machine over, plugged in a replacement chip and it was running again. Nice.

At the local university there was a card operated photo copy machine. 5 cents a page or something like that. But, one could ask for a copy, and listen for a little wine as some part began to spin up, hit eject on the card and get a free page.

Most locked doors in my primary school could be opened with just hand manipulation of the doorknob. Turns out they were not mounted in their recommended orientation. A gravity based attack was possible and I found it one day bored just fiddling with the knob. Turns out, the more I moved it, the more motion was possible!

Reporting that got me into trouble too. I remember that clearly!

Of course they were angry at the doors being so easy, tried to assign blame to me, a 6th grader, amd were more concerned about the work and cost to fix the issue.

If only people would just avoid doing anything unexpected, there would not be a problem. In fact, there was not a problem, until you came along...

I remember looks on adult faces I did not see often when my response was, "How would you know?"

Some foreshadowing there for sure.

Heck, I even did responsible disclosure. Took it right to them first. Could have blabbed it to others and then what?

Yeah, got the look again.

One phone related one was super interesting too. A friend and I took an old pulse dial phone apart and were kind of stunned to see how simple it was. Then we made calls successfully without the dialer, just slapping the handset hook with anything close to the expected pulse rate. Cool.

Then we called one another and were doing it again, just interrupting one another. Soon, an operator was on the line asking how we did this call. So we told her.

Turns out we had dialed some test sequence or other. Of course it was not published and was not intended for use doing an actual, live call. Tech had to reset the whole thing, but we did get a super cool tour of the system later as that same tech was happy to show us how the robot like, electromechanical system worked. Amazing. These trees of open circuits! When one dialed a number, that number was an address that literally moved an rotated arms that closed the circuit to connect the intended phones!

Fun times. So much was human scale and could be directly seen, heard, felt and was slow enough to be explored directly.