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

[DanBlather]

@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”.

[beowulff]

@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…