# Cliche:  "What's the Code?"  "We Have 4 Digits, Still Working on the Last One!"

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cliche-whats-the-code-we-have-4-digits-still-working-on-the-last-one/492509>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 9, 2009, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cliche-whats-the-code-we-have-4-digits-still-working-on-the-last-one/492509 "2009-04-09T14:40:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2009, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cliche-whats-the-code-we-have-4-digits-still-working-on-the-last-one/492509/41 "2009-04-12T16:41:11Z")

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> [@Kobal2](#):
>
> I stand corrected - but in my defense, c’mon, they still had put-the-actual-phone-on-the-mike modems back then ! And my parents, who went to engineering school in the 70s, still talk about how they used friggin’ punch cards in their computer classes. PUNCH CARDS ! That’s like, sooo Cobol 😃

Ask them if they’ve heard of the new object oriented Cobol. It’s called “Add one to Cobol”.

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**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\
**Post date:** [April 12, 2009, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cliche-whats-the-code-we-have-4-digits-still-working-on-the-last-one/492509/42 "2009-04-12T17:02:59Z")

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> [@Deeg](#):
>
> There is no relation between cracking a code one digit at a time and reality. None. It’s nothing more than a plot device to add tension and it drives me (a software engineer) nuts.
> 
> The _War Games_ example is especially galling. A supposedly super computer is cracking a code digit by digit and it takes something like half a minute (it’s been a while since I last saw it) to determine the last digit! It has 10 choices and it can’t figure it out! Bah!
> 
> I will go dunk my head in ice water.

Not true.

There was a bug in the password lookup in an old (1970’s - 80’s) OS (maybe VMS?) that caused a page fault when the letter it was trying to match wasn’t correct. So, you walked the though the alphabet one letter at a time, looking for page faults. When you didn’t get one, you knew that letter matched, and you tried with the next character in the password. I learned of this bug way back in 1982…

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