This is off topic, but it felt like it was worthwhile putting here, because I've come across this page so many times, and every time I reread it and get to experience it again.
I realized that JT's site was down, and went searching around, found her Twitter and Instagram, realized she had been homeless for over two years, and apparently just recently passed away. Given that she was homeless, trans, and talked pretty openly open her internal and external struggles, I have my suspicions about what happened.
I feel pretty gutted because I support a couple of people on Patreon, and if I had come across her Twitter six months ago and saw the state she was in, I would have jumped at the opportunity to became a Patron to try to help her get back on her feet.
Not much of a point here, other than to try and pay attention to people a little bit more, and help out where you can.
Can we just appreciate that someone did write that program for the Atari palmtop 30 years ago just so it would appear for 5 seconds in a movie. Crazy.
I wonder how the hiring for that position go? "Our movie studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and hackery on screen."
Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.
Enjoyed the PIN .svg, but those old Turbo IDE screens got me right in the feels. Never used Turbo 7...Turbo 3 was the bomb back in the day. And yes, WordPerfect... those old enough remember "Reveal Codes" Why did we like this?
Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 was my jam. Not only was the interface really cool and feature-rich, but it also had a built-in language reference that was incredibly helpful to me at the time when I was learning to program.
Wow. Reading the bit about disabling the chip security makes me wonder what the point of a chip card is in the first place? All it takes is lifting the mag strip and altering it to declare that there’s no chip.
To this day I have never seen an engineer laugh as long as I did when I introduced the original Zombo.com to a coworker, back when it was new and somewhat unknown (I think I discovered it via Fark.com?)
I owned one in great condition as a university student in the mid-90's. It died one day and I got rid of it -- moving onto more modern pocket computers. But I totally regret getting rid of it -- now that I know so much more about electronics it probably would have been an easy fix.
Should've been "write('Press Enter when ready ...');" because "readln" will wait only for <ENTER> key to continue. Anything else you press meanwhile will just appear on screen.
OR
instead of "readln;" put "readkey;" - that one would've simply continued regardless of whatever you'd press (well, CTRL / SHIFT not included).
======================
Quote2: "writeln('');
writeln('');"
Unnecessary. If you want empty lines you can simply say "writeln;writeln;" - no parameters required.
=======================
Quote3: "while true do
begin
.
.
.
if (length <= 4) then
break;
end;"
Oh boy, do I spot a C/C++ programmer. Here is the better solution:
Awesome, just watched this two nights ago. fun to think even in 1992 it was still acceptable to show someone cracking a password by whittling down the passwords one character at a time. To their credit at least it was a bit better than war games, where it just locks in one character at a time. Where this one could maybe construe that it started with some hash of the pin stored on the machine and accessible via the card reader in reverse..., and they were maybe factoring it. Still an awesome scene and by far my favorite james cameron movie.
That's one of the things I still miss about my Palm Pilot Pro. It ran on 1 (or 2??) AA batteries, and it lasted a month (seemingly regardless of how much I used it; which is just my imagination, but regardless that's still the impression I have).
The other thing I dearly miss: being able to read it in full sunlight.
That's a great read, congratulations to the author.
I wish newer movies featured devices like Cosmo Communicator, Pro1X or upcoming PinePhone with keyboard case in the hacking scenes to give the handhelds with keyboards a second chance. Last time I saw a cool handheld in a hacking scene(movie, so no Mr.Robot) was Nokia N8 in Tron Legacy(2010), but it really should have been N9.
His instructions at the bottom include "ft.com". I couldn't find anything by googling. It turns out the "index" file on the FTP site describes each file:
Portfolio/Telecomm:
Index 0 Verbose list of files in this directory (this file)
acom11.lzh 16 Terminal program
dial.lzh 2 Xterm dialer
ft.com 11 Parallel module file transfer program
pfboot.lzh 1 symbolic link to -> utilities/pfboot.lzh
port8bit.lzh 3 Tech doc describing pofo to Atari 8 bit connecting
porttost.lzh 5 GET Xterm on the Portfolio without files transfer
quick.lzh 7 Input cheques in the field and upload to Quicken later
slave.lzh 18 Host program (Pofo to any terminal supporting X-Modem)
xterm2.lzh 5 Term program, includes XMODEM file transfer capability
I have that palmtop and implemented it in qbasic after seeing the movie.
(of course also only the animation)
Wrote some more "hacker-simulators" after that.
Got me into programming.
Apart from the obvious feels (I love that movie), the big takeaway from this for me is https://github.com/nbedos/termtosvg - makes me think, considering how much I enjoy creating documentation (sort of as a relaxing technique), why the hell haven't I jazzed up my READMEs yet?!
[+] [-] ssalazar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auto|5 years ago|reply
I realized that JT's site was down, and went searching around, found her Twitter and Instagram, realized she had been homeless for over two years, and apparently just recently passed away. Given that she was homeless, trans, and talked pretty openly open her internal and external struggles, I have my suspicions about what happened.
I feel pretty gutted because I support a couple of people on Patreon, and if I had come across her Twitter six months ago and saw the state she was in, I would have jumped at the opportunity to became a Patron to try to help her get back on her feet.
Not much of a point here, other than to try and pay attention to people a little bit more, and help out where you can.
[+] [-] lbj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|5 years ago|reply
I wonder how the hiring for that position go? "Our movie studio is looking for a programmer to code a sequence that simulates PIN cracking on an Atari which will look cool and hackery on screen."
Either way, that coder did a stellar job in making it look really legit vs the shitty hacking sequences that followed in movies of the early '00 where you could hack the DoD by typing on the keyboard random words really fast or assembling some 3D shapes on an SGI machine to break encryption.
[+] [-] canadian_tired|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|5 years ago|reply
At least with TeX, I can see all of the commands. Word? Best I can hope is I saw it make the change and that undo actually works.
[+] [-] Minor49er|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msmith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ea1k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedatk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unbalancedevh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munro|5 years ago|reply
https://samy.pl/magspoof/
It's crazy, if your electro magnet is strong enough, you don't even need a tin foil wrapped credit card to put in the machine!
[+] [-] twodave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jevinskie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|5 years ago|reply
I owned one.
edit: I should have never sold it as a student. But alas.
[+] [-] tra3|5 years ago|reply
4.5v at probably 1000 mAh each cell? Or 5Wh. Do you recall how long it lasted for?
Also the last frame: "PIN identification number" for your "ATM teller machine"...
[+] [-] wvenable|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobrains|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deanebarker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metalliqaz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HighChaparral|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|5 years ago|reply
A travesty.
[+] [-] umvi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doovd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raisedbyninjas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csharptwdec19|5 years ago|reply
Thank you for that.
[+] [-] cheschire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unnouinceput|5 years ago|reply
OR
instead of "readln;" put "readkey;" - that one would've simply continued regardless of whatever you'd press (well, CTRL / SHIFT not included).
======================
Quote2: "writeln(''); writeln('');"
Unnecessary. If you want empty lines you can simply say "writeln;writeln;" - no parameters required.
=======================
Quote3: "while true do begin
.
.
.
Oh boy, do I spot a C/C++ programmer. Here is the better solution:"repeat
.
.
.
until length <= 4"
[+] [-] leecarraher|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makach|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UI_at_80x24|5 years ago|reply
The other thing I dearly miss: being able to read it in full sunlight.
[+] [-] outworlder|5 years ago|reply
> 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM
We can do much better nowadays with incredibly cheap microcontrollers.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|5 years ago|reply
I wish newer movies featured devices like Cosmo Communicator, Pro1X or upcoming PinePhone with keyboard case in the hacking scenes to give the handhelds with keyboards a second chance. Last time I saw a cool handheld in a hacking scene(movie, so no Mr.Robot) was Nokia N8 in Tron Legacy(2010), but it really should have been N9.
[+] [-] WalterGR|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdowling|5 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVfwEEjRfs
[+] [-] kryptonomist|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johannboehme|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noisy_boy|5 years ago|reply