"You may find the punchline to this in your notes file," Ressler told Todd. Franklin cleared the nearest console. The screen returned with its eternally patient prompt:
Command?
Two-fingered, amateurish, Franklin typed NOTES and hit the Return key, that quintessential late-century punctuation.
NOTES RECVD: Read (y or n)? y
Note from jsteadman, @ 12/06/83, 16:14.
Take a break! This means you! Ask your woman friend out for dinner at the Rusty Scupper. That heap of bolts won't run any faster with you watching it! Uncle Jim.
"Heartbreaking," Franklin laughed. "The man apologizes for giving us a deserved dressing-down."
"I received a similar one," Dr. Ressler said.
Todd turned to me and howled. "And what do you do first thing upon returning? A shame, for women to speak in church!" He turned back to his dialogue with the CRT.
Note @ 12/06/83, 20:23 to: jsteadman
Jimmy, We're sorry too. Even the woman friend. Her only offense is pride in ingenuity. But I think we've caught her in time. Love from everyone, FTODD
Note sent. Command?
Todd looked up from his typing to the man whose opinion meant everything. "What do you suppose Uncle Jim would say if he knew you were in possession of every combination in this joint?"
Dr. Ressler shrugged painfully. "Passwords are trivial. How many words are there in English? How many in Indo-European, including all forms and proper names?"
Both men looked at me. A hopeless task, even to estimate the order of magnitude. I tried a rough, running total, falling back upon the technical reply, "Lots and lots." Ressler's eyes flashed; it was bliss to see him happy.
"And folks don't restrict themselves to meaningful combinations," Franklin objected.
"Nevertheless, passwords are trivial. One can employ the brute-force solution. Use one computer to generate all possible combinations of letters in words of given length. Then pipe the results to the computer demanding the password. Such a solution is not elegant but is as inexorable as death."
I thought out loud. "Every possible combination? Wouldn't writing the program be prohibitively difficult?"
Ressler smiled at my impeccable novitiate's thinking. He liked being reminded of the old place. He shook his head and said, "I could write that program in a dozen lines."
Todd clapped his hands. "Go to it." Ressler scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper, then showed us his handiwork:
For first letter from A to Z
For second letter from A to Z
For third letter from A to Z
…
Word = first letter + second letter 4- third letter… try word
…
Next third letter
Next second letter
Next first letter
I looked at his program, feeling the rush of forgotten terrain opening. He said, "The ellipses are for longer words. In the loop, one could start with blanks instead of A's, to include all words shorter than the number of imbedded cogs. You see__" And I did see; my first glimpse of the synthetic achievement of language. "You see that the nested loops produce words in simple combinatorial order: AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on."
"How long would it take such a program to run?" I asked, the cumbersome coordination of loops within loops dawning on me.
"Some time. Lots and lots."
"That's why God invented operators," Todd contributed.
"To speed the search, you could pipe likely lists — say our online file of the hundred and twenty thousand most common English words. That's a gamble, however. If the word is not on the list, you're left with no systematic way of picking up the pieces." At that moment, I saw in the exhausted face a look so unlikely I almost missed it. Gratitude at the chance of exchange, at stumbling across a listener after years of having no audience but himself. A look full of wonder that he was being thrown back, after everything, on the shifting ambiguity of first letter plus second letter plus third. He motioned toward the console, asking Franklin, "Do you have anything running at the moment?"
"Work, you mean? What a curious idea." Franklin turned to the keyboard. At the system prompt, he typed the command LOG.
20:36 Dumping console transactions to log. Mode brief. Begin when?
"What time did I show up tonight?" he asked Ressler, his eyes on the monitor.
"As I recall, you were here ten minutes before closing, camped over the terminal, waiting eagerly for the last remote teller to log off so that you could bring your machine down and begin the end-of-day processing." Todd winced at the portrait and typed a time. A thermal printer embedded in the tabletop began bruising a roll of paper, producing a printout that varied only in detail from the scraps that, hopeless pack rat, I scavenged for inclusion in the capsule.
Command? EOD
18:37 Begin end of day processing. Mount Sys Pack on Spindle 1, Master Client File on Spindle 2, Client Backup on Spindle 3, and scratch on Spindle 4. Oldest cycle date tape in tape drive. Hit any key when ready?
18:43 End of day underway; backing to tape…
18:58 Backup complete. Rewind tape and unthread.
19:01 Conditioning Master File…
19:20 Master File conditioned. Merging transactions…
19:42 Transactions merged. Ledgering new trans file. Running new-acct. Running purge. Running trial balance.
19:46 End of day complete. Command? PAY
19:46 Begin Tuesday pay cycle processing. Thread payroll tape, General Ledger pack on Spindle 3. Position checks in printer. Hit any key when ready?
The latest fable from Homo fabulus. Todd whistled at the history of his evening. "Do I really live this way?" "Check your partitions," Ressler said.
Command? TASKCHECK
20:38 Partition 1: Payroll check ok.
Partition 2: Report Generator check ok. No other partitions active.
"Steady as she goes. What do you have in mind?"
"Open a third partition. Give it a half a meg."
Todd gritted his teeth and shouted, papier-mâché-set style, "I don't know if the engines will stand it, Captain." He tapped a few keys. "Et voilà. Bute."
"Now. Do a part reset."
"Don't know how."
Ressler hit a key combination I missed, and the screen read:
Sys 1652 Exp Ver 4.2 partition reset login:
Ressler typed FTODD. The screen prompted for a password. "Turn around," Ressler said. Seconds later, he called, "Done."
password: xxxxxxx
System Date and Time: 12/06/83 20:40.45
User ftodd logged in.
"American Satan!" Todd shouted. "You couldn't possibly have learned that by brute force."
"No, sir."
"Selected list?" I suggested, and was rewarded by a warm no.
He let us savor the trick before confessing, "I have to admit to charlatanism here. I did not actually crack your password. I simply jumped to partition two, called up your record page, and blind-piped your password from the user profile to the unsuspecting partition."