Since we are doing Blast from the past Friday, I'll ad my own little 
rememberance.   None of this IBM stuff though.

Back in the days of SPL, LISTDIR, LISTDIR2, SOO, GOO, STARTREK, ADVENT 
(remember XYZZY?) and Series III's, we had a very curious group of guys, 
(ok, nerds), in our high school.   We were fortunate enough to have timeshare 
access to this neat paper terminal that logged remotely into something called 
a HP3000.  (you guessed it, Series III).

Now our computer teacher, (the guy who drew the short straw to teach the 
class), had us building really kewl card games.  But you had to lockword your 
game so no one could steal your very important BASIC code.

Now since we really like playing these card games, and lockwords are just 
plain inconvient, (they took LISTDIR away from us).   We figured out that, 
hey, it's only 8 possible digits, with 26 letters and 10 numbers.   It's a 
computer, let it figure out the lockword.

27 lines of BASIC code later, we had a working Lockword buster.   Sounds 
great?   Not on a Series III!   Would lock that machine up solid until it found 
our lockword.   Too bad for the other school systems, and businesses on the 
system, (and the SM...he was SOL til it finished).   This was our machine.   
Oops.

So between our lockword buster programs, (those were banned), and one 
incident of sending a program called "STARTREK" to another school that just 
spewed paper between countdown phrases of "100 Bottles of beer on the 
wall", (Break turned off of course).    They learned to watch this little school 
in Iowa pretty quick.  (Took away our ability to send tells).

Well, thats my contribution, keep them coming.   

Jim Rogers
Ajilon Consulting
(817) 564-5432

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