Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Computer Nostalgia

My kids still can't believe that when I went to college (late 70s - early 80s), the campus was served by The Computer, and when The Computer crashed (which it did with alarming frequency), everyone was out of luck.

I had a roommate who worked at the computer center, so naturally he had access to all of the users' passwords. (Hey, it was a more innocent time.  Besides, what could you do if you had access to someone else's password?  Steal all of their Fortran programs?) My roommate told us one night that all of the users thought they were so clever in choosing obscure passwords, but one single password accounted for nearly half the users on the system. Can you guess this password? (Hint: Most computer users back then were also SF fans).

The answer:  NCC-1701

My apologies if that actually is your current password.  You should probably change it.

4 comments:

J.T. Kirk said...

What the #&%&! Thanks a lot. Now I have reset the password on the self-destruct sequence.

Rob Knop said...

...and here was me thinking the password would be "000destruct0".

Unknown said...

I was thinking Hal9000.

Phillip Helbig said...

Times have changed. I think the most common password these days is bigtits (or some variation thereof).