I remember when our physics teacher rolled in a couple ICONs… Our school never got around to building a [/del]cirriculum[/del] [del]ciricculuum[/del] course around them, so I’ve not used Turing. But a bunch of us, along with that teacher, had been messing around with the Commodore PETs and we comprised an informal club of sorts. So naturally he let us loose on these beasts (oh look, a built in trackball!).
It was the first computer system I’d seen that had security: If I recall, they shipped with one username “root” whose default password was “superuser” It had administrator privileges and the command prompt was a $. After messing around for a few weeks, our teacher finally changed the password, created actual accounts for us with him as boss and us a mere users. Now my command prompt was a %. He challenged us, “I bet you can’t hack in and log on as me.”
Little did he know during our times with free reign we’d discovered a little bug. I forget the details, but it involved a program called “speak” which was a rudimentary text-to-speech synthesizer. We waited for our teacher to log on, convinced him to run 'speak" in a way that exploited the bug, then later re-ran speak which caused it to believe we were him… the $ was back!
The passwords were stored in clear-text files… I’ll never forget the look on his face when triumphantly we ask, “Sir, does ‘vijay789’ mean anything to you?”
Thanks, Mindfield for the memory… oh, and for Rocky’s Boots too!
Our course was the exact opposite: the only purpose for the existence of those ICONs at Woodbridge High was for Turing. We never got to touch anything else. Not that it would have amounted to anything useful anyway, but anything would have been more interesting than spending 5-10 minutes on a black screen with white text compiling a 20-line Turing program. (That isn’t hyperbole; that’s really how long it took on average to compile a simple guess-the-number program on those blasted things! Maybe it was faster with fewer users, but in a class of 15 people, fuggeddaboudit)
Funny thing, but I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us to try and hack it. I guess the pointlessness of the actual coursework we were doing sort of carried over into extra curricular activities: What was the point? It’s not like any of us were going to be using ICONs or QNX at any forseeable point in the future.
My pleasure, it was a bit of fun down an old cobwebby path of memory lane.
>Damn, I’m freaking old. We didn’t even use calculators till I was in 5th or 6th grade.
>Hell, I am older than you and I learned Basic (not QBASIC but essentially the same thing) on an Apple IIE starting in 4th grade.
Thanks, guys. I didn’t learn Basic until I was out of school and working, and it came out on TRS 80’s. But I did get to see a transistor radio, in elementary school, when they came out.
I started elementary school in Sept 1960. The first computer stuff I learned was some very low level FORTRAN when I hit college in the early 70s. I know nothing of any other programming stuff. I’m a user, not a programmer.
I was drawn to the Math Lab on campus - there was an ancient Teletype machine that chattered constantly. I found it was hooked up to a downtown mainframe by a 110 baud acoustic modem. It was immediately resolved that I must learn this monstrosity.
We programmed in BASIC. We saved our programs on punched tape. To load a program you loaded the tape in an attached reader, and pressed START.
Our group was incredibly inventive. Programs were written to unMASK (an early encryption) any file so MASKed, a text-based football game, and a program to punch out on tape letters and numbers.
Our instructor was the son of classical composer Arnold Schoenberg. I had the good fortune to have dinner with him a few years ago. I asked him how much he really knew about the computer back then. His response surprised me, as he said: “You guys were way ahead of anything I could comprehend. I just tried to guide you into making your own discoveries.” One of my favorite teachers of all time.
And in my senior year, we finally were able to save our programs to a new hard disk drive the District purchased. In exploring, we found we shared hard drive space with all of the Los Angeles Unified School District student files. We hacked our way in, added several non-existant students (think names like Ashleigh J. Roachclip), created transcripts for them - and never got caught.
